Experience

Hello, below you will find the different types of projects I have worked on during my career so far.

I worked at a company called Space Micro for several years as a Mechanical Engineer. The company was very small, around 50 people. Space Micro specialized in space products. They mostly made sub systems such as radios, star trackers, and gps devices for large satellites. The company was also just getting into the up and coming cubesat era. I was hired to start on a new contract they had just received from the government. The mission of the project was to design and build half of a 3U cubesat. Another company was building the other half of the 3U cubesat that we would eventually attach to before launching into space.

The design of the cubesat consisted of 5 different printed circuit boards. I worked with Electrical Engineers and pcb layout designers in order to come up with envelope dimensions and mounting design for the printed circuit boards. I worked with manufacturing engineers in order to make manufacturing instructions for the printed circuit boards. I designed a custom frame for each printed circuit board. A 6th frame was designed to combine all of the other frames into one enclosure.

I performed thermal analysis based on the power wattage of each pcb component in order to find out if components were going to overheat. If there were any problem areas, I would need to build a heat sink for the component in order to increase the thermal transfer on the part. Then I performed random vibration and shock analysis based on the launch spacecrafts loads in order to find out if the cubesat would survive.

I also designed test fixtures, tools, and cables to aid in the development of the cubesat. Some other things I did at the company were testing of systems in thermal vacuum chambers and on vibration tables.