Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7594-2284

Date Available

6-20-2024

Year of Publication

2024

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Engineering

Department/School/Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

James Lumpp

Second Advisor

Alexandre Martin

Abstract

This research documents the design, testing, and implementation of sensing, control, and communications subsystems for small atmospheric entry capsules. Atmospheric entry capsules pose a unique electronics design challenge given mission requirements, environmental constraints, and inherent risk involved in space based missions. Previous work on small satellites developed the CubeSat platform as a means of ensuring reliability after university-led small satellite missions experienced failures. The publication of the CubeSat platform allowed researchers to focus on the payload science utilizing a standardized form-factor and reusable electronics. Environmental and operational constraints of CubeSats and atmospheric entry capsules overlap and best-practices associated with building CubeSats are applicable to re-entry capsules, however, the limited number of instrumented atmospheric entry experiments yields sparsely published work on their design and testing methodologies. Systems engineering methodologies previously documented with respect to CubeSats are applied in this work to develop, test, and validate atmospheric entry capsules. Considerations include balancing battery capacity and available internal physical space, optimizing scientific data transmission in a low-bandwidth environment, decreasing measurement error in sensing subsystems, and reducing power consumption of dormant electronics. Electronic hardware, software, integration, and testing procedures are presented for three iterations of designs which were validated and improved through four missions.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.248

Funding Information

Funding for this project was provided by National Aeronautics and Space Administration Kentucky Space Grant Award (sub-award of 80NSSC20M0047), National Aeronautics and Space Administration Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research Award 80NSSC19M0014 (M. Wright Technical Monitor) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration Award 80NSSC21K0286 (A. Sidor Technical Monitor)

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