Team takes 1st place in student spacecraft design competition

Aerospace engineering students in Matt Hausman’s senior spacecraft design course in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign took first place in AIAA’s Undergraduate Team Space Design Competition, which challenges students to develop innovative solutions for industry-inspired requests for proposals.

This year’s RFP addressed a critical need for astronaut safety. As NASA prepares for crewed missions to Mars, more robust weather monitoring is needed, including a communications relay system to alert astronauts about dangerous solar radiation events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

The project manager for the Space Exploration of Martian Atmosphere and Heliophysics team, Sai Naka, said early in the design process, it became apparent that any design with a single spacecraft would have communication blackout periods for approximately 2 weeks every 26 months when the Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun. A spacecraft constellation was necessary.

Their winning design project, Heliophysics and Advanced Detection System, includes three spacecraft working together to provide continuous early warnings of solar events to crewed missions operating in the Mars system.

Naka said satellite locations for maximum connectivity to Earth and cost were the teams’ major concerns.

“We knew going in that we’d need at least two satellites. We decided to add a third to differentiate us from other teams and give us another point of observation to create a triangle with Earth.”

The three satellites had some level of communication and observation redundancy, but also specific tasks. One was specifically for observation, another was primarily for communication back to Earth, and the third is for Mars observation.

“The $400-million budget felt very low. Maybe for one satellite, but we had multiple, so a major issue was getting our design within budget and ensuring that we get all our science observation correct. We decided to use SpaceX's rocket for deployment. We had $100 million dedicated just to that. So that was already a quarter gone.”

Naka said interfacing between all the subsystems was a challenge—understanding how a change on one subsystem will affect another and trying to land in the Goldilocks zone for everyone.  He worked closely with the team’s systems engineer, Dhairya Mehta.

“All of the sub teams have competing interests,” Mehta said. “They’re all trying to make the best version of their subsystem. The unfortunate reality is that they all compete with each other for resources, for mass. That’s the job of the systems engineer, to make those compromises.”

Mehta said one example of compromise was between communications and power.

“Because the distance from Earth to Mars is so far, we had a giant, 6-meter diameter communications antenna—our most power-hungry tool—and going to be running all the time. But that also affects the attitude determination and control system because you have to use the thrusters on your spacecraft to point the antenna.

“One thing Professor Hausman said in class is there is a difference between verification and validation. Verification is, do you have the best system? Validation is, do you have the right system? You have to balance all those performance aspects with cost and mass—staying within our mass budget.”

Hausman was a mission manager at SpaceX before joining the faculty in 2024. His role there included aspects of both project management and systems engineering.  Hausman was also on the first-place spacecraft design team in the 2001 AIAA competition when he was a student at U of I with Victoria Coverstone as the team’s faculty adviser. Mehta said Hausman helped the team a lot, particularly in developing a concept of operations.

“We were having some difficulties in getting all the orbits together without using much fuel. He gave us a couple ideas that we weren't thinking about yet.”

Team members and their roles: Sai Naka, project manager; Dhairya Mehta, systems engineer; Spyridon Kalleas, orbital and command and data handling; Katheryn Kramek, space environment and structures; Shaun Golemis, comms and ground station; Michael Ashbaugh, power and attitude determination and control system; Elliott Valadez, propulsion and payload; and Rauf Zokhrabov, launch and thermal.

Members of the team will present their work at the AIAA SciTech Conference in Orlando in January.