Presenting at the AIAA Student Conference

Author: Mattie McLellan | Major: Mechanical Engineering, Physics | Semester: Spring 2024

I am Mattie McLellan a student in the Engineering and Fulbright college studying mechanical engineering with the aerospace concentration and physics. I work with Dr. Adam Huang in the Mechanical Engineering Department. This semester of research was the spring semester of my sophomore year. In the future I plan to attend graduate school to pursue my PhD.

In my research I am developing scientific instrumentation for small satellites that obtain atmospheric content data. Using light to measure wavelength absorption in the atmosphere, the chemical species present will be determined by a spectrometer. The laser will be emitted from one satellite and detected by another satellite in a cube satellite system. With the power and size constraints for small satellites the design of this instrument will be suitable for most spacecraft. Additionally, the separated emitter and detector increase the precision of wavelengths measured. This instrument can provide new knowledge of more elusive celestial bodies’ atmospheres like Venus or Titan. I first met with Dr. Huang in the first-year engineering class, Honors Research Experience. My class partner and I worked within his group under Ethan Graff on ionized propulsion on aircrafts with the use of dielectric barrier discharge devices. After concluding our project with Ethan, I expressed interest in continuing with the group. I wanted to shift my focus from aircraft to spacecraft and so began my work on Dr. Huang’s small satellite missions. Dr. Huang walked me through a few aspects of the proposed Arksat 3 mission, the CubeSats in development. When we first discussed spectroscopy and developing a scientific instrument for atmospheric study, I naively found interest and thought this project would fit my skill set best. Now with a little more knowledge I would say I was probably right, with a large learning curve, my skills are mostly suited for this topic, and I do still find it very intriguing work. Although after picking my project, it seemed learning every theoretical and practical concept to a degree in which I could brainstorm, and problem shoot through the fruition of a working instrument was not quite as simple as one would hope. Maybe I have a misguided confidence in my own ability and intelligence that encourages taking a bite I can’t chew, but I feel like my lesson here was you need to start chewing if you want to figure out if you are capable. My doubt started when first diving in. Nothing I was learning really seemed to click; my confidence became shaky, but as I kept going in taking every little piece, things started looking up. I could see the connection between everything. When first learning how the CubeSat would operate, followed by each operation, and repeating looking at the function and then how it functions for about every piece, like the spectrometer and every computing system, individual was difficult to learn. As things started to connect everything, I studied validated what I had already learned, and rebuilt my optimism.

Most of the challenges with the technical side were not the most complex issues; however, with my lack of experience it would take a good amount of time to fix every issue. Dr. Huang is very helpful with his experience-based judgement. He understands the capabilities of our technology and what possibilities are best suited for our problems or application. He has guided what I need to learn to be capable of seeing this project built. Besides the collaborative discussion of the challenges in my work each week with all the members of Dr. Huang’s research team, which have been very helpful, and some discussion of working with of few other faculty members in the future, no one else has played a primary role in helping me. This semester I did travel to a conference to present some of my results.

I went to the AIAA region IV student conference in Stillwater, Oklahoma; The part of this project I presented on was the communication of the spectroscopy specifications between two satellites in the Arksat 3 mission. I talked to some professionals in aerospace, heard what other students are researching, and generally learn what the experience of presenting at a conference looks like. Next in my plan will be compiling some of the hardware that I have been testing and writing programs for to test the concept used to approach a component of the larger system. In the fall I will hit the ground running on this next objective.