INTEGRATION OF A NASA ESMD FACULTY FELLOWSHIP PROJECT WITHIN AN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING CAPSTONE DESIGN CLASS

摘要

The United States (US) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Exploration Systems MissionDirectorate (ESMD) provides university faculty fellowships that prepare the faculty to implement senior engineeringcapstone design class projects that possess the potential to contribute to NASA ESMD objectives. The goal of theESMD is to develop new capabilities, support technologies and research that will enable sustained and affordablehuman and robotic space exploration. In order to create a workforce that will have the desire and skills necessary toachieve these goals, the NASA ESMD faculty fellowship program enables university faculty to work on specificprojects at a NASA field center and then implement the project within their senior design class. This allows thesenior design students the opportunity to develop critical design experience using methods and design tools specifiedwithin NASA's Systems Engineering (SE) Handbook. The faculty fellowship projects focus upon four specific areascritical to the future of space exploration: spacecraft, propulsion, lunar and planetary surface systems and groundoperations. As the result of a 2010 fellowship, whereby faculty research was conducted at Marshall Space FlightCenter (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama (AL), senior design students in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering(MAE) department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) had the opportunity to complete senior designprojects that pertained to current work conducted to support ESMD objectives. Specifically, the UAH MAE studentsutilized X-TOOLSS (eXploration Toolset for the Optimization Of Launch and Space Systems), an EvolutionaryComputing (EC) design optimization software, as well as design, analyze, fabricate and test a lunar regolithburrowing device - referred to as the Lunar Wormbot (LW) - that is aimed at exploring and retrieving samples oflunar regolith. These two projects were implemented during the 2010-2011 academic year at UAH and have provento significantly motivate and enhance the students understanding of the design, development and optimization ofspace systems. The current paper provides an overview of the NASA ESMD faculty fellowship program, the 2010fellowship projects, a detailed description of the means of integrating the X-TOOLSS and LW projects within theUAH MAE senior design class, the MAE student design project results, as well as the learning outcome and impactthe ESMD project had upon the engineering students.