DADsat (Senior Capstone Design Project)

As part of our studies, I along with 9 of my peers carried out the design of a mission all the way out to a Preliminary Design Review (PDR). The mission was based on a focus on a response to the NASA Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) call. The limitations were that it had to be a nano/CubeSat mission with a maximum size of 6U, max cost of $6M, and lasting a total of 5 years. The mission had to be innovative and would launched along with the Mars 2020 mission. With these constraints in mind, my team opted for a satellite that would travel to Mars to detect and map microwave and optical emissions from electrical discharges in the Martian atmosphere.

Before the final presentation, there were seven different reviews that were to be presented to our professor (who served as our Principal Investigator or PI). Each one focused on a different facet of the mission and provided us a general schedule on what milestones had to be completed in what order.

At the beginning of the project each team member was assigned a role. Some of those included Project manager and Systems Engineer. Although I was tasked as a systems engineer focusing on the orbit and command & data handling (CDH) capabilities of the spacecraft, all members of the team contributed to all aspects of the design.

The following is the summary of the mission that was presented to our professors, peers, and members of industry.