Aerospace Concepts staffer completes NASA internship

Small Satellites

Aerospace Concepts graduate engineer Stuart Kearney undertook a three month internship at NASA Ames Research Centre in the San Francisco Bay Area over December 2011 to February 2012.

The theme for Stuart’s internship was ‘best practices for systems engineering for microspace and small satellite missions’  and was incorporated into the PhoneSat project  under the supervision of Dr Chris Boshuizen. The PhoneSat project is a technology demonstration mission funded by NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA Headquarters. The project was started in summer 2009 as a student-led collaborative project between NASA Ames and the International Space University to demonstrate a practical, extremely low-cost space mission.

Stuart’s internship program had two primary objectives, to improve his Systems Engineering skills and to assist with communications sub-system development. The key deliverable for the first goal was a paper entitled ‘Data driven Systems Engineering’ which will be delivered to a future Systems Engineering Conference. The deliverables for the hands on work was a trade study investigating lost cost satellite radio options and a paper on optimising the radio link for the existing radio sub-system.

Aerospace Concepts is deeply appreciative of the team at NASA Ames Research Centre for assisting with this internship and looks forward to future collaborations.

Update: After a successful internship and returning to Australia to work with Aerospace Concepts on model based systems engineering projects, Stuart Kearney has since returned to Silicon Valley build his own business, Slant.