Goddard Space Flight Center
January 11, 2021 – April 30, 2021
Goals of your project/s:
The original goal of my project was to create engineering drawings for a subassembly of the spacecraft for the Roman Space Telescope mission. These would then be used for thermal hardware installation and work order authorization. By doing this, I would also become proficient with the CAD software CREO Parametric.
Describe what you did during the internship.
My one project then morphed into three different projects. For the first project, I placed thermal hardware on a CAD assembly of the outer barrel assembly (OBA) in CREO. I added about 125 heaters, 15 temperature sensors, and 20 thermostats. Then, from that CAD file, I made six different engineering drawings detailing the placement, bill of materials, and bonding instructions for the thermal hardware on the OBA. My second project was organizing a large excel file of material property data extracted from the thermal model of the entire Roman Space Telescope. To do this, I sorted the materials into separate sheets and put like materials together. Then, I plotted each material property for each material type against temperature. I took these plots and compared them to the James Webb Space Telescope database to find discrepancies. Finally, to organize all the information, I made a material properties summary map to concisely summarize the material information, property information, and comments with either which source they matched within the database or what the discrepancy was. My third and final project was creating a thermal model for a harness mounting bracket from the optical telescope assembly (OTA). To do this, I used the Thermal Desktop in Autodesk. I used the pre-made CAD file for the part and in Thermal Desktop added nodes and elements, material properties, and the wall thicknesses to form the part. Finally, to test the part, a heat load was placed on the underside of the bracket and was conducted up through to the topside. By doing this, we found the heat flow and temperature difference values and could then calculate the thermal conductance.
Did you achieve your goals? What were the results and conclusions?
The engineering drawings I created will be used as references for hardware installation and work order authorization. The material property summary map will be used to correct the found discrepancies in the material properties. Finally, from the thermal model we found that the bracket is not currently meeting the thermal isolation requirement. Because of this, the design will be revised to improve thermal isolation. I believe I achieved my goals plus much more. I was able to not only learn one program but two. I also got to work with a lot of different people in a lot of different areas which I really enjoyed.
Describe positive lessons learned from this experience:
I strengthened my time management and organizational skills during this experience. Especially since I was working remotely, it was not easy at first to structure my workday. However, by the end I found a great balance. Due to being remote, I learned to become more proactive and actively search out the help I needed to finish a task. I had the opportunity to attend events such as a presentation by Nobel Prize winner John Mather and a virtual tour around the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, Texas.
Describe negative lessons learned from this experience:
From this experience, I learned to keep backups of my backups of my work. Unfortunately, I had several software issues throughout the few months working at Goddard. I lost all of my engineering drawings due to a software update just after completing them. I then had only a day to redo all of the work that had originally taken me a week. I managed to get this task completed and it was easier the second time since I already knew what to do. I would like to prevent this from happening again in the future.