Ae105 Overview

Aerospace Engineering (Ae) 105 is a core component of the Masters Degree Program in Space Engineering. The course is sectioned into two components. The first is focused on the fundamental components of spacecraft engineering: mission design, structural dynamics, orbital mechanics and guidance navigation & control (GNC). The course is instructed by JPL engineers who offer insight into real-world problems. For the second half of the course, students collaborate with each other, along with GALCIT researchers on the AAReST mission. Several design areas are stressed with this project: spacecraft analysis and design, optics/telescope design and testing, composite boom testing, telescope software architecture, and electronics design. Students make significant contributions to these design areas, ultimately furthering the status of the mission as a whole.

Current Tasks:

• Overall mission design (mass/power budget, orbit selection, mission requirements)
• Spacecraft structural design and analysis
• Hardware selection for satellite
• Development of GNC simulator for spacecraft
• Spacecraft modelling in STK (power, communications, and docking analysis)
• Design, fabrication, and testing of solar panels and antennas
• Development of flight software

Previous Tasks:

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• Telescope architecture
• Telescope optics design (Zemax simulations)
• Preliminary thermal analysis
• Deployable boom design
• Mechanical design of camera and mirror box flight hardware
• Design of electromagnetic docking mechanism
• Autonomous reconfiguration algorithms (2D air-table experiments)
• Fabrication of deformable mirrors
• Flight qualification of deployable boom (dynamic deployment experiments, vibration testing)
• Flight qualification of camera and mirror boxes (thermal and vibration testing)
• Development of spacecraft electronics
• End-to-end testing of telescope

Ae105 Instructors:

• Tony Freeman
• Daniel Scharf
• Oscar Alvarez-Salazar