Engineering Commons^™

Thermal And Orbital Analysis Of Darkness Cubesat, Katie Dickey

Honors Program Projects

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is sending a 3U CubeSat into LEO to search for a 3.5 keV photon corresponding to the decay of a theorized dark matter particle called the sterile neutrino. The CubeSat will encounter environmental variations while in orbit that can be computed through an orbital analysis using System’s Tool Kit. In order to minimize thermal noise readout, improve optical resolution, and increase bandwidth, the sensors must be kept below 170K while taking data. This temperature is difficult to achieve due to radiation from the Sun and the Earth’s albedo radiation. Through the thermal analysis, the lowest temperature …

Detection Systems For Airbag Deployment, Ryan S. Kee

Honors Program Projects

The airbag enablement system in today’s automobiles is not ideal and may allow airbags to deploy when they should not. Weight sensors detect pressure when someone sits in a passenger seat, enabling the airbag to deploy if an accident occurs. This system is flawed. For example, if a heavy box is placed in a passenger seat, the airbag will be unnecessarily enabled. The goal of this research project was to determine if different sensors—not weight sensors or cameras—could be used to identify the occupant of an automobile seat.

Using a microchip programmed in C language, a circuit was designed with …