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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Master’s Thesis Announcement
Student: Parker Francis, B.S.As.E.
Committee:
Prof. Glenn Lightsey (Advisor)
Prof. Brian Gunter
Prof. Marcus Holzinger
Date/Time: July 20th, 2016 at 12:30 PM
Location: MK 317
Abstract:
This thesis presents the design and analysis of a small spacecraft bus for use by the Georgia Tech Space System’s Design Lab. It is designed with research projects in mind, and levies the previous design work of The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Spacecraft Lab. The bus offers capabilities that are competitive to currently available commercial small spacecraft busses. The system has been designed with a variety of missions in mind, and is shown to be capable of completing several past missions that each had a customized spacecraft bus. Additional effort was placed into improving the bus’ robustness and reliability to a level that has yet to be realized on CubeSats. Redundant components and software algorithms are utilized to ensure system functionality in the event of a component failure. The spacecraft bus has also been developed with the university engineering and research environment in mind. The student-built system’s reliability and integrity is developed over the course of many tests, rigorous quality assurance processes, and through the use of heritage flight components. The redundancy and system integration architecture offers an unmatched 98% reliability value for one year missions. Each payload accommodated and each mission flown will add to the bus’ heritage as approximately 95% of the spacecraft bus is common between missions. For these reasons, the TECHBus is a novel system that is unique in the current CubeSat bus market.
