The NASA Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler (L'SPACE) Academy is an online, interactive student professional development program open to undergraduate students interested in pursuing a career in STEM or with NASA/other space organizations. During the summer of 2020, I was selected to participate in the L’SPACE Mission Concept Academy, where I worked on a team of 13 interdisciplinary scientists, mathematicians, and engineers from universities across the United States to design and document a mock-up mission to Mars. During this academy, we were tasked with selecting and justifying a science objective on Mars and designing a small or large payload on a specified budget. Throughout the 12 week project, we also received weekly training lectures from experienced NASA scientists and engineers.
During the project portion of the academy, my team (Team Telos-1) justified that our mission statement would be as follows: to explore and determine the geological history of the Jezero crater on Mars by utilizing RIMFAX, Mini-TES, and Pancam instrumentation to analyze the surface mineral compositions and map the Martian lithological layers. Playing to my strengths on the team, I served as deputy project manager and was also a member of the engineering subteam. With our science objective defined, several engineers on the project worked on various subsystems to design and model (Siemens NX) our final lander.
The following presentation and preliminary design review document were submitted at the conclusion of the NASA L’SPACE Mission Concept Academy.
Preliminary Design Review: Telos-1 Rover
Teammates
Andrew Rich, Salam Mulhem, Adrian Aguilar, Myeongchan Kim, Jared Sewell, Christopher Lopez, Ian Bell, Haotian Cao, Bailey Singkhek, Tania Cuff, Hoa Tang, Monika Solis