Mission to Mars Student Challenge: Design Your Spacecraft

How long does it take to design a spacecraft?  Sure, that process for the most part always starts with an idea of a mission to go do, like let’s go take this science measurement to this location or maybe take cool photos of this feature on whichever planet you’re interested in. You then address like big picture things, it’s like once you reach your destination are you orbiting it? Are you driving around on the surface? Then you focus in on the more detailed things, like if you need wheels? How big do they need to be? What are they made out of? Things like that, and at the end you get to build whatever it is you design and test it and that whole process is a couple years but it’s broken into many different parts that are all super interesting.

What factors do you take into consideration when designing a spacecraft?  Sure, when designing a spacecraft, the choices you make in the design always come back to what does the spacecraft need to do? Does it need to take photos? Does it need to take other science measurements? How does it communicate home? And when you start working on those questions in detail you say okay, we need an antenna that’s this size, we need wheels that can drive this fast, you select those components and through that you arrive at a overall rover or orbiter system that does what you need to do.

How many times do you test a spacecraft before it’s ready for launch? That is a very big question and it’s very dependent on what you’re trying to test, you might test a lot of samples of your specific type of steel or aluminum to make sure it has the strength you need. We’ve done a lot of 3D printed prototypes that you could call a test but it’s really just how big does this thing look in real life and how does it fit with its neighboring components on the spacecraft.

Then once you actually start building whatever it is you’ve designed you can do smaller subsystem tests so maybe if you have a camera with a cover that protects it, how does the camera cover open and close? You might do tests of that in different environments like, make it really hot or make it really cold. At the end once you have your vehicle built and it’s ready to go there’s a lot of tests at that system level, make sure the cameras can interact with the computers, make sure driving works like you thought it was going to work.

So at each phase of the project your tests get bigger and bigger all with a goal of can the thing that I’m building do its intended task in its intended environment. You’ve mentioned a few different kinds of spacecraft, is it better to send an orbiter? a lander? or a rover to a planet that you’re planning to explore? Better the hard thing to pick, each of those three has its good applications, like for example if you send an orbiter you can get those cool 360-degree maps of what does this planet or moon actually look like.

And if you want to get up close photos of things that you just can’t see from that far away, then you need to send something to the surface. The InSight lander that recently went to Mars has equipment all over it that will measure properties of Mars geology those type of measurements can be done easily in just one place. Now rovers are my personal favorite because I’ve that’s what I’ve been working on during my time with JPL, not to say they’re the best but now you can actually go around to different locations looking for environments that could support life, sometimes being able to drive around is a huge benefit to that.

Thanks so much for joining us today Billy, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us about designing a spacecraft, the next step in developing a mission to Mars. Cool thanks for having me, it’s been a good time. Now that you’ve heard why this step is important, you’re ready to start designing your spacecraft. Stay tuned for the next step in developing a mission to Mars, launching your mission. .