ARMADILLO and XSOLANTRA
My passion has always been to build and work on spacecraft. ARMADILLO and XSOLANTRA made that a reality.
When I was in college at the University of Texas at Austin, I worked at the nascent Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (known then as the Satellite Design Lab). The Lab collaborated with Baylor University and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to create a small satellite they named ARMADILLO, which would test new technology in Low Earth Orbit. I was a part of the Structures Team to make sure that our satellite was manufacturable, possible to assemble, and within budget from a materials standpoint. I learned about designing assemblies in such a way that they could be built in a certain order and how to communicate designs clearly through engineering drawings.
ARMADILLO Model in 2012
ARMADILLO Cubesat in 2019
XSOLANTRA was a satellite mission that I helped to design and plan as part of a Senior Project in college. The goal of the mission was to find exoplanets using radio interferometry on a 3U CubeSat. I was in charge of making sure that the structure and thermal load on the satellite would not cause issues with the instruments onboard. Using what I learned from the ARMADILLO project, I was able to design a similar 3U cubesat for this mission.
During launch, both from the Earth and from the launch/deployment vehicle, the satellite’s thin aluminum body would see stresses. I ran a simple stress analysis and validated that the satellite body would not yield or break with significant safety factor included.
Snapshot from XSOLANTRA Paper
Payload Shell Stress Analysis at +/- 6 g’s in X direction
Since the satellite would be in orbit, it would cycle between seeing extreme cold when it was in the shadow of the Earth, to extreme heat with direct sunlight. I ran a single node thermal analysis assuming the satellite as a single point and determined that in the hot case, the satellite would reach steady state temperature at an acceptable level for the instruments.
After we had presented our project, JPL engineers approached some of us and asked us to publish this paper for presentation at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in March of 2013!
