Hypersonic ReEntry Deployable Glider Experiment (HEDGE)

Spacecraft Design

Aug. 2022 - May 2023 (expected)

Technical Skills: CFD, Thermal FEA

Objective: Design the attitude determination and control system for a CubeSat in extreme low Earth orbit that will act as a hypersonic flight vehicle upon reentry.

About:

As an aerospace engineering student at the University of Virginia (UVA), I am tasked with completing a CAPSTONE project. This includes working on a coupled technical and ethical research project. The technical portion of the project is group-based, consisting of 30+ students divided into sub-teams working toward a common goal. This common goal is HEDGE.

HEDGE, or Hypersonic reEntry Deployable Glider Experiment, is an experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of using CubeSats for extremely low cost hypersonic testing. The aerospace engineering students in the Spacecraft Design course at UVA are working on this multi-year project for the academic 2022-2023 year.

The objectives of HEDGE are to show the use of CubeSats in hypersonic testing, but also to give students experience in real-world aerospace product development as we go through the stages of mission engineering and work with the aerospace industry to create a fly-able product (and actually launch it).

Contributions:

Attitude Determination and Control Systems (ADACS) and Orbits

I serve as the functional team leader for HEDGE's ADACS and Orbits subsystem. For this position, I have managed my team of six (6) of my peers and worked with them to meet deadlines and plan the experiment's ADACS components. I have acted as a representative for

HEDGE design created by Structures and Integration subsystem for Spacecraft Design at UVA

my team, attending meetings with the other team leaders to ensure that we are all working together and with the correct information as each team's progress was heavily dependent on that of the others.

My team created a state of the art (SOA) presentation for attitude determination and control systems and presented this to our peers and professor.

My team contributed to the class's Preliminary Design Review slides and I presented them along with the other team leaders to our peers and professor.

Lessons Learned:

This project will continue to the end of my fourth, and final, year at UVA. This far, I have learned to be a responsible and communicative leader. My failures would be the failures of my team, reflecting poorly on us and being reflected in our grades. I learned more about doing effective research. With a project as specific as this, the resources were limited in terms of finding directly applicable materials. This meant interpreting and making assumptions from research and knowing when to discard information that would not be applicable. I learned what goes into space mission engineering and the design review process, as we completed a prelimiary design review (PDR) and are working toward a critical design review (CDR) next semester.

I learned about ADACS and Orbits and the tools used for these subsystems and how they function and are applied.