Deployment of Cabling on Hypothesized Surfaces – RHIT – B
INSTITUTION
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT)
CLASS
Iridium Class (2024 – 2025)
STUDENT TEAM
ACADEMIC GUIDANCE
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The NASA Psyche mission is an orbiter mission to the metal-rich asteroid, Psyche, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft, which launched in October 2023 and will arrive at the asteroid in mid-2029, will study the asteroid from orbit and will not land on the surface. However, astronomers are currently developing concepts for low-frequency radio telescopes on other planetary bodies, so it is possible to imagine that after learning about Psyche from orbit, there may be scientists and engineers interested in proposing a future mission to deploy observational equipment on the surface, including low-frequency radio telescope antennas that take advantage of the special properties of Psyche for data collection. Using the asteroid’s known and hypothesized environmental and surface conditions, which have been laid out in recent scientific reports (and keeping in mind other constraints such as its gravity, length of day and year, rotation, surface temperature, etc.), the team will design a robotic system that can deploy a 1 km cable (consisting of 10x single mode fiber optic lines and 10x 26 AWG copper pairs sheathed in a UV-resistant polyurethane coating) on the surface of Psyche for the construction of a hypothesized low-frequency telescope array.