My work on:
NASA's Micro-G NEXT Student Challenge: (August 2020 - June 2021)
Throughout my senior year at Purdue, I participated in NASA's Micro-G Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Teams (Micro-G NEXT) competition. NASA is known for pushing boundaries, and that acronym is a great example.
That year, the goal of the competition was to develop an alignment jig and coring bit (which doubled as a sample containment mechanism) for NASA's handheld drills, so that they could be used by Artemis astronauts to safely take subsurface samples of lunar soil and lunar ice.
We were a team of six students and my role was as the mechanical lead. So, the design, manufacturing, and test of the devices fell under my purview.
Throughout my senior year at Purdue, I participated in NASA's Micro-G Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Teams (Micro-G NEXT) competition. NASA is known for pushing boundaries, and that acronym is a great example.
That year, the goal of the competition was to develop an alignment jig and coring bit (which doubled as a sample containment mechanism) for NASA's handheld drills, so that they could be used by Artemis astronauts to safely take subsurface samples of lunar soil and lunar ice.
We were a team of six students and my role was as the mechanical lead. So, the design, manufacturing, and test of the devices fell under my purview.
Early concept of the bit & jig, circa Sept. 2020
The coring bit was machined from carbon steel and was milled in-house at Purdue's Bechtel Innovation and Design Center. The jig was a combination of COTS parts, aluminum precisely machined by Protolabs, and PLA prints that I shamelessly used my roommate's 3D printer for.
Our design was selected by NASA to be tested in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) by NASA astronauts. Under normal circumstances we would have been invited to Johnson Space Center to observe the testing ourselves, but June 2021 was still peak Covid.
I did get to (digitally) meet and ideate with Purdue alum and astronaut Scott Tingle, who handled our equipment in the NBL and advised us on its shortcomings and potential design improvements. These notes were passed on to the following Purdue team should they have chosen to continue this design challenge, but they opted to begin a new challenge for 2022. I would have done the same!
Many design concessions had to be made so that the jig could operate in a liquid medium for testing at the NBL, that wouldn't be necessary for use in a vacuum. Think mechanisms and channels to mitigate hydraulic effects. These comprised most of the issues raised by Scott, which let us laugh and commiserate about the common engineering Catch-22. Testing complicates design, but not testing complicates the outcome.
We got a "B" in the corresponding design project course for working remotely too often. In the height of the pandemic. Can't win 'em all!
Organizations:
