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

'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 5^th, 6^th and 7 graders from various schools in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti kicked-off with an introduction workshop on 13^th 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 2^nd and 3^rd 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

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

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

XSAS Ground Testing Rig and Prototype Fabrication

Welcome back to the XSAS blog!

In this post I will explain my work on the payload/structures team building the ground testing rig for XSAS. I will also talk about the progress we are making on the XSAS prototype, the results of the thermal vac testing, and the rover structure we started building for the outreach program.

Before our microgravity flight we want to test the deployment of XSAS on the ground. The best way to do this is to have it extend horizontally on some kind of moving platform. The platform I designed is supported by ball bearing rollers and has a plate that clamps down on each end of XSAS. I recently machined both bottom plates and assembled the majority of these rolling platforms.

Progress continues on the XSAS prototype. The project's critical design review is this Thursday, and we want to show off the prototype to our faculty and peers. A majority of the parts have been machined and assembly will begin earlier this week.

Results from the thermal vacuum testing are in, and it's all good news. The hinges and scissors structure were tested in a vacuum at 100 degrees Celsius. The scissors structure successfully deployed, and the dyneema burn to release the structure occurred 5 seconds sooner. We concluded that there are no negative effects of thermal expansion on the hinges or scissors structure and that the dyneema likely melted faster due to the high temperature.

The outreach team has also started work on the rovers to be used for the "Build Your Own Rover" workshop series. We played around with our supplies and came up with the basic structure design for the rover chassis. The rovers will be made out of PVC pipes and use servos to control tires for movement and searing. The payload we will likely have the kids build will support a camera for a reconnaissance mission.

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

Nathan McKay
Structures/Payload Team
Outreach Team
Systems Team

XSAS Thermal Testing and Prototype Fabrication

Hey XSAS followers, in this entry I'm going to be talking about what we've been up to this week on the Payload subsystem.

We recently completed a test rig of our scissor structure that will be used on XSAS.  Since this is only a test, we didn't use anything fancy, we made the panels out of polycarbonate and mounted the setup to a scrap aluminum plate.  This rig allows us to study the deployment of our scissor.  We wrap a line of dyneema around the scissor to compress it, which is shown below:

To deploy the scissor, we stuck a resistor on the wire and ran current through it to heat it up.  This melts the wire and allows the structure to open up.  We end up with the deployed configuration shown below:

We're currently in the process of running this test in an oven at 100°C to see if thermal expansion affects the deployment (i.e. if the hinges get stuck).

We also started fabrication of the XSAS microgravity prototype this week.  So far we've completed the panels, which are identical to the ones seen in the pictures above in the test rig, and we should be done with the scissor pieces very soon (also similar to what is shown above). 

We have a long way to go with fabrication, but we should have completed something that looks like this by the end of this month:

 

  

 That's what's new this week for XSAS!

Joshua Robinson

XSAS Payload Team Lead

Electrical and Power Systems & Command and Data Handling

In this post, I'll be explaining what's going on in the electrical and power systems & command and data handling subsystem (EPS&CDH).

The EPS&CDH subsystem is in charge of wiring, power, and data collection for XSAS.  In essence, anything that uses electricity. 

In our last post, Clark talked about using PCB boards as placeholders for the solar panels on the experimental XSAS flight.  He also mentioned the use of accelerometers and strain gauges on these boards to monitor how the boards react when XSAS is released.  These strain gauges and accelerometers are going to record all the data measurements to a microSD card.  That’s where we come in.

This week, the members of EPS&CDH have been finalizing the list of components we need on these boards.  Recording data from a sensor like an accelerometer or a strain gauge is a process that requires many parts.  In addition, we’re trying to save as much space as possible, so some of these parts are really small.  The accelerometers we’re planning on using are 4mm x 4mm in size!

Stay tuned for a new blog post next week!

Arun Dutta

EPS&CDH Team Member