Emerald Nanosatellite

As part of my college career I worked as a systems/mechanical engineer on joint satellite initiative.  The Emerald Nano-satelltes were to be the first of series of joint work between universities, the commercial satellite industry and AFRL/NASA.  On the university side Emerald was the combined work of Stanford and Santa Clara University.  Emerald was to be a testbed for five distinct experiments: 1) VLF Atmospheric Science, 2) Colloid Micro-Thruster, 3) Distributed System Autonomy, 4) GPS Formation Flying, 5) Distributed Computing.    As a systems engineer I was responsible for overseeing the integration of the mechanical, electrical and computer systems.  I also was the lead mechanical engineer for the structures and mechanisms team which had the responsibility of designing and implmenting the following: 1) the overall satellite structure(s) 2) drag panel deployment and operation, 3) VLF antenna deployment, 4) component enclosures, 5) ground transportation and handling system.  The following is a brief outline of those 5 sub-systems.  If you want to more detailed information you can read our thesis and check out this slide presentation.  

This project was a major undertaking that challenged and help hone my design skills, project management abilities, and greatly improved my understanding of teamwork.

   1.  Nano-sateliite structure.  The animation below shows only one of the satellites.  There were two identical satellties that were designed and built that were attached with a Lightbad separation system that would deploy them once launched in space.

2. Deploment mechanisms.  Pictured below from left to right are the linear actuator used for control of the drag panels, the drag panels, and a CAD drawing of the VLF antenna including the deployment mechanism.

3. Electronics Enclosures.

4. Ground Handling System for Transportation

The satelllites were to be put aboard a manned space shuttle and resutling in very stringent safety guidelines.  A considerable amount of my team's work was designing double fault tolerant safety systems.  Below are a couple examples of the Finite Element Analysis that was conducted on the overall structure.