Tag Archives: reentry

NASA Project: REBR-UPS

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(Imported from old site; original post: Tuesday, February 5, 2013)

nasa custom logo

So I have escaped the winter snowfall of Kentucky in lieu of California’s weather. I am currently in Ventura California at the Gordon Research Conference in Atmospheric Reentry Physics. Why am I qualified to be here, you ask? Don’t worry. I don’t know, either…

I was invited to present information about the REBR project that my team decided to design. We still didn’t have the project fully defined at the time, so we did as much research as possible, figured out where REBR could be best used (e.g. research universities), guessed at what we thought REBR could be used for in addition to its current capabilities, and defined the project ourselves. We then created a large presentation poster containing these ideas. “Hopefully,” we thought, “Aerospace Corporation will agree that the direction we have chosen is the best direction.” And they did. Well, Dr. Bill (William) Ailor did. But he IS Aerospace Corporation to me, so same thing.

Dr. Ailor was the only one in attendance from Aerospace Corporation (that I found), and after reading the poster and talking it over with me, he gave us the go-ahead to continue the work we started. There have been other people I have had conversations with here that have also agreed, at least to an extent of wanting to see more development of it, and that it has good potential. Including people from the ESA (European Space Agency), DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) from the United Kingdom, NASA Langley, and Lockheed Martin. No big deal… Those are in no particular order of awesome, because they are all awesome.

Following is the poster that was presented at the conference about our new design for REBR. We call it, REBR-UPS, which stands for ReEntry Breakup Recorder–Universal Payload System. Beware: it’s 12.5 MB. Keep in mind, the actual size of the poster is very nearly 4 feet wide, and 5.5 feet tall.

NASA Project Update 2

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(Imported from old site; original post: Tuesday, January 8, 2013)

rebr closeup

So, tonight I met with my team about the final choice of project. After discussing it and voting, we all agreed that it would be best to proceed with REBR rather than the CubeSat. The actual design work starts tomorrow. We still don’t have a project fully defined from NASA/Aerospace Corporation (the company that invented REBR), but I’m sure we’ll get that all settled soon. Not much else to say other than I am excited for the year ahead. I hope (know) that we’ll do great things.

Gotta have faith in your team.

And I should.

I hand-picked them for a reason!

NASA Project Update

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(Imported from old site; original post: Wednesday, December 26, 2012)

rebr

Because of finals week and finals week preparation, I haven’t had a chance to give any updates, but there is good news on the NASA front: funding has been approved as of December fourth. That means that I will be working on a CubeSat next semester! I actually already anticipated receiving funding as well as UK approval, so I’ve already started building my team. I feel good about my team, and when everything gets in full swing, I’ll give them a proper introduction.

Also, I had a telephone meeting this past Thursday with Dr. Martin from UK, Dr. Ioana Cozmuta from NASA Ames, and Dr. William Ailor from Aerospace Corporation. We discussed the possibility of working on a few different improvements of REBR rather than the CubeSat. I have yet to discuss it with all of my team members, but so far with those I’ve talked to, it seems pretty split on which we should work. Many more questions to be asked, but that’s okay–they’ll be answered in time.

More updates to follow.

NASA Proposal

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(Imported from old site; original post: Saturday, October 20, 2012)

space cool

As discussed in the NASA Project entry, I have been attempting to make my senior design project at UK awesome. And awesome things require awesome amounts of money. So, you have to start early.

Recently, Dr. Alexandre Martin (my old, but young, fluids professor, that I mentioned in the NASA Project entry) and I wrote a proposal to NASA asking for money. I was surprised to receive a letter of support prior to the submission of the proposal from none other than Ioana Cozmuta herself (also discussed in the NASA Project post). To quickly sum up, she was essentially the inspiration for this project. The proposal was just submitted today (with her letter included, of course), and I guess we’ll back some time between a year and six months from now. Yes, in that order.

So I may be exaggerating a bit on the time, but it should be before January of next year (2013). Other proposals will need to be written, of course, to other companies. I certainly do NOT volunteer my company to give massive amounts of money to this effort. Why should I when there are aerospace companies with a much larger budget than mine! That’s a joke. Laugh. A true joke, but a joke, nonetheless. Laugh anyway.

Here’s the proposal if you’d like to look through it. The letter is attached as the last page of the PDF: MARTIN_TP_Project_2012