Week 8: A bit late

From a young age, I always wanted to make something rhyme. And when that impulse recently struck me again, I decided to set this post up a little late... Because 8 rhymes with late.

Now that I've had my little fun, I would also like to announce that I have finished the project. All that's left for me to do is to polish up the presentation The Google Drive document can be found here.


Without further ado, I will now describe what great progress I had.

From the trade study, I have now progressed onto the ConOps. The ConOps or Concept of Operations is a very critical graphic as it allows a layman audience to understand the nature of a space mission without actually knowing much about about how space missions work. It depicts the critical stages of a spacecraft. The current stages of the ConOps are in a different font in the following list.

1. Pre-mission ground phase: Evacuation of air from membrane at steady state.(separate figure)
2. Launch and Orbit Insertion: Launch to predetermined orbit (TBD).
3. De-tumbling and Attitude Stabilization.
4. Carry out systems check: First pass fault detection and handling.
5. Pointing membrane surface (top surface of the cubesat) towards the sun.
6. Temperature data used as feedback to trigger the burn wire release mechanism.
7. Camera switched on, starts filming.
8. Membrane deployment mechanism initiated.
9. Valves opened to allow gas into membrane.
10. Inflatable deployment images process and fault handling by mission computer.
11. Data Downlink/ Uplink.
12. Secondary mission initiates: A communications handshake is attempted between the Ground Station and the inflatable antenna based communication system. Performance metrics are recording and data sent back.
13. Data analyzed to determine mission success or failure.
14. Tertiary Mission if required and/or possible: Images of the earth at different locations.
15. Spacecraft disposal.

The only significant issue with a ConOps is that they are very tedious to make with software. After all, you need to depict your spacecraft in its various stages as accurately as you can. This requires generating images from CAD software. It gets especially tedious if your spacecraft deploys something. Then you have to slightly modify the CAD model and then create a photo to place within the ConOps graphic.

Also, I should learn Microsoft Visio to create a pleasant representation of the ConOps. Although I could borrow a computer to use Visio, currently, I am using PowerPoint. In my opinion, Visio is powerful, it is an overkill to use it for PowerPoint.

Lastly, the CAD models haven't been created just yet, so there are some gaps in the ConOps graphic.

A ConOps Graphic by Eric Ye

Now there might be some who say that this looks pretty dang ugly, and to that I will respond, "indeed." This is just a placeholder until the pictures generated from the CAD models come in.

I am currently trying to create a good orbit for the spacecraft to travel along. Then I will do a power budget based on that orbit



Speaking of April Fool's Day, I once taped a paper on the BASIS Men's bathroom that said out-of-order. That was pretty funny because it was out of order earlier that day, and some poor souls believed it. That was also the same day some knucklehead dyed the fountains. Because we didn't clean the fountains, they were still colored on the day I left the old BASIS building.

As for the weekly meme....

I ate it.