Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Second Outreach Event and Updates on XSAS

Hi and welcome back to the XSAS blog!

We just held our second outreach event last weekend and it was hosted by the structures team. We wanted to teach the students about the importance of structures in engineering and how they could apply these concepts in building their own rover. They also had a fun activity where they could build and modify their own paper gliders to see how they could fly the best.

The students were split up into teams and with the help of XSAS team members, came up with structural designs for their rover. They had to figure out a way to protect and attach a camera to the rover chassis, as well as mount some batteries and a radio transceiver. The teams drew out their plans and held miniature design reviews and then were given the 'OK' to collect materials and start building! They had to creatively use the materials supplied (plastic bags, cardboard, balsa wood, paper cups, tape, and glue).

As for XSAS, we have done some significant building ourselves. All of the parts for our first prototype are nearly finished and we are beginning assembly. We have also begun testing of the NiChrome/Dyneema burn system that we will use to release XSAS during microgravity testing.

Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more updates on XSAS and our outreach program!

Andrew Chou
Structures and Payload Team Member

Friday, March 19, 2010

First Outreach Workshop Pictures

Our first outreach event was a huge success! See post below for a description of the event. Here are some more pictures:
Student participation at the beginning of our workshop. In this photo, our undergraduate engineering students are collaborating with the middle school participants to help design their egg-drop systems. The goal was to design a structure to protect an egg from a 2nd or 3rd floor drop test. Middle school students were divided into 5 different 4-member groups.

Students presenting their designs to the group

Group names and slogans for the egg-drop
 
Fabricating the hardware

Testing from the 2nd floor

The egg didn't break!

Another team succeeds!

Josh and I also tried

Success!

Dropping eggs from the 3rd floor


With the help of the XSAS team members, all 5 student teams designed great systems to protect an egg from a 2nd and 3rd floor drop. Not a single egg broke all day (even though we had towels prepared just in case). Stay tuned for more pictures and updates from our next Outreach event on March 20th.

Thanks,
Patrick

Sunday, March 14, 2010

'Build your own Rover'









Hi everyone and welcome back! This is the first XSAS blog after spring break. After the fun times we all had during our break, it was time to get back to working on XSAS.
The CDR was an important milestone and gave the team some important feedback. It is now time to work in high gear as the semester has just over a month left and flight week is just over 3 months away.
Taking into account the CDR feedback, this week’s schedule was quite busy. A resistor or Nichrome is going to be used to burn the wire in the release mechanism. This requires extensive testing in terms of the burn time, nichrome grades and resitance values. Also other options available instead of dyneema need to be looked into because dyneema is very strong but it also has a high melting point. These tests are to begin early in the week. Another important thing to be done was to finish the machining of the XSAS prototype and assemble it by next week so that ground testing may be able to begin.
But the most exciting event that happened this week was the beginning of the 6-week long ‘Build your own Rover program’ as part of XSAS outreach activities. The program which is being participated by 5th, 6th and 7 graders from various schools in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti kicked-off with an introduction workshop on 13th March. In this workshop, the students were first shown a microgravity video of the team who tested their project last year. The video got them all excited about the workshop and the activities they will be doing. After that, a few team building activities were organized which would help the kids to get to know each other. It was then time to actually build something! The kids had to build an ‘egg-drop mechanism’; they would toss an egg from the 2nd and 3rd floor of the FXB building without breaking it. There was some standard material which was given to all the teams and they had to choose from some other things which would enable them to build a better mechanism. In this activity, the students got a chance to display their creativity and also their presentation skills because they had to present their designs to everyone. Many innovative designs were seen and it was fortunate that none of the eggs broke thus avoiding messing up the building! Overall the event was a lot of fun for everyone and the kids also learnt a lot and were all looking forward to the forthcoming weeks when they would build their own rover.    


Thanks and keep reading.

Manan Thakkar
XSAS Payload Team


Monday, March 8, 2010

Pictures from our Critical Design Review


Enjoy :)



 
 XSAS Team

CDR Reviewers


Jeff presents our latching mechanism


Vivek presenting the CDH operations diagram


 
 Daniel presents a CDH hardware diagram


  
 Clark presenting structural analysis


  
Andrew C. presenting release mechanism sequence of operations


 
Mike presenting A/C mounted structure construction schedule



Andrew L. presenting Deployed XSAS Configuration


Team photo


Thanks,
Patrick

Sunday, March 7, 2010

XSAS Critical Design Review

Hi, welcome back to XSAS blog!

We just completed our Critical Design Review on February 25, 2010. Let me tell you more about the Critical Design Review (CDR).

CDR is an important step in our preparation for the flight test in Houston this coming up Summer. In CDR, we presented our finalized design for XSAS. Each member of XSAS presented their work in front of faculty member, excom member, and other S3FL students (undergraduate and graduate). Through the presentation, we get critics and inputs to improve our design. After we have the final design of XSAS, we are now ordering components for building XSAS and hoping that the components will get here after Spring Break (after March 7).

We also get a good news about outreach. We get lots of middle school students signed up for the outreach program. We have also ordered the parts for the outreach program.

There's nothing much more I can tell you since we are now in Spring Break and all members are on break. However, we have more fun story to tell you after the break! We will start building XSAS!!! And we will tell you more about how the outreach program goes..

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for next weeks blog post.

Devina Sanjaya
EPS &CDH member
Outreach member