A team of undergraduate students traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas this summer. They went to witness the tool carrier they designed being tested at NASA’s underwater facility—the 40-feet deep Neutral Buoyancy Lab pool. From topside, one of the students communicated with the diver, giving them live, detailed instructions on how to operate the tool.
This year, AE rising sophomore Alana Falter was behind the microphone. She said the diver was enthusiastic and provided helpful feedback during the testing. A video of the divers testing Illinois’ 2024 entry can be viewed courtesy of NASA.
“The diver commented that he liked the design of the top handle,” Falter said. “He liked that the ridges were designed to fit fingers, but they were a bit too far apart for his hand. That’s an easy fix though just by changing the CAD a little and reprint it.”
Falter stressed the NASA program called Micro-g NEXT, “is a challenge, not a competition. And because the challenge is so vastly different each year, we can’t learn from previous year teams’ designs.”
From the four challenges presented this year, the Illinois team chose to design a hand carrier for lunar extravehicular activity tools. It needed to be designed so it could be adjusted to at least two different heights: short for transport and tall for working at the sampling site. Finer adjustment capability was permitted if it is easily executed by a suited astronaut during a spacewalk. The adjustment system must be dust-tolerant and weigh not more than 10 pounds but be able to support nine pounds of lunar tools.
Illinois Micro-g team lead Emma Held said “It’s a unique project because you do the entire design process from brainstorming an idea to building the final product in one year. This carrier is the biggest tool the team has ever had to create, so that was a challenge in itself—fabricating something that large on campus.
“Astronauts have limited mobility so we had to make the design accessible for astronauts’ range of motion,” Held said. “For instance, they don’t bend over very far, so our design accommodated that with a scissor-lift apparatus under it.”
The team fabricated their design at the Siebel Center for Design on campus and were able to pre-test the tool in one of the U of I pools during a time when there weren’t any swimmers present.
“I would say, the biggest challenge of our design was that we wanted it to be a one-handed mechanism to deploy the legs, with two different heights,” said Alana Falter, who served as the research and testing lead on the project. “Ultimately, we developed a handle that works a little like the mechanism to stand up an ironing board. The handle is attached to a rod that pulls the legs up.”
The carrier also had to accommodate tools, but they weren’t given the exact dimensions of the tools ahead of time.
“We designed a C-clip and 3D printed them in several different sizes so when we got to NBL, we could see which ones worked best with the tools,” Falter said.
On the pool deck, just before it was their turn to test the carrier in the water, the team was given some time to work with the actual tools. They tried a few different configurations to see where each tool would fit best, hung/mounted to the sides of the carrier using the C-clips.
“Because we were unable to test the final loading configuration of the tools before the pool test, they were unevenly loaded on the device once it got into the pool and tipped a bit,” Falter said. “However, the C-clips were modular, so the problem could easily be rectified and when the diver took the tools off, it was perfectly stable. Looking back, we should have brought more clips, too,” she said.
Micro-g NEXT is facilitated by Illinois Space Society, a registered student organization at U of I. The group created a video before heading to Texas for testing in NBL. “Micro-g teams can only have two team members from the previous year,” Falter said. “But the way we look at it in Illinois Space Society is that Micro-g is a good group for first-year students to join. There are no precedents to get onboard. You just jump in and get experience. It’s new for everyone.”
In addition to Falter and Held, the other team members who went to Houston are Zoe Surles, Gabriela Zabiegaj, Tiana Foreman, and Design and Manufacturing Lead Ryan Smith.
Others on the team who could not make the trip are Communications Lead Drew Eimer, Design and Manufacturing Lead for the first semester AJ Bernardo, Niharika Navin, Kate Pactol, Theodore Prama Raditya, Ryan Souka, Mythri Subash, Aditi Badde, and Vincent Ma.