ESA Concurrent Engineering Challenge
Hey! John from the electrical division here.
The previous week was super hectic for most of the members in Kiruna. Those of us taking the class "Spacecraft Design" had the privilege of partake in the "ESA Concurrent Engineering Challenge".
This was an event where three universities was invited to join ESA in an exercise to learn about how concurrent enginerring works and why it is the way of the future.
The class was divided into the different subsystems. I got selected to design the Electrical Power Subsystem, together with three other people. The main pupose for us was to design the solar arrays and
the electrical storage system (batteries). To do this all subsystem groups had to work together and develop our mission in a parallel fashion, as this is the whole idea with concurrent engineering. The lord and savior
for us was the SMAD, basically the book on space engineering. It tells you all about how to size the solar panels, estimate power consumptions and loads of other technical design features.
There were quite many sunbsystems in the group. To name a few we had: Trajectory, taking care of the orbit and the technicalities of the launch; Propulsion, handling everything that had to do with a motor;
structure and configuration, they put all of the subsystems together, fitting it on the launcher that was chosen.
Loads of work was done by the whole class. At the end of each day we presented for the other universites what our progress was and design descitions we had made. At the end of the week the final design
was presented.
The challenge was an adventure, for sure. Spending one week, getting to know how ESA actually work in projects gave us valuable experience for the future.
The previous week was super hectic for most of the members in Kiruna. Those of us taking the class "Spacecraft Design" had the privilege of partake in the "ESA Concurrent Engineering Challenge".
This was an event where three universities was invited to join ESA in an exercise to learn about how concurrent enginerring works and why it is the way of the future.
The class was divided into the different subsystems. I got selected to design the Electrical Power Subsystem, together with three other people. The main pupose for us was to design the solar arrays and
the electrical storage system (batteries). To do this all subsystem groups had to work together and develop our mission in a parallel fashion, as this is the whole idea with concurrent engineering. The lord and savior
for us was the SMAD, basically the book on space engineering. It tells you all about how to size the solar panels, estimate power consumptions and loads of other technical design features.
There were quite many sunbsystems in the group. To name a few we had: Trajectory, taking care of the orbit and the technicalities of the launch; Propulsion, handling everything that had to do with a motor;
structure and configuration, they put all of the subsystems together, fitting it on the launcher that was chosen.
Loads of work was done by the whole class. At the end of each day we presented for the other universites what our progress was and design descitions we had made. At the end of the week the final design
was presented.
The challenge was an adventure, for sure. Spending one week, getting to know how ESA actually work in projects gave us valuable experience for the future.
If you want to read more about this challenge or any other crash course from ESA I recommend taking a look at the ESA Education website: https://www.esa.int/Education
Now it's back to evaluating PCBs
Signing out, John