The CCD Laboratory at MIT Kavli Institute is starting to develop a prototype photometric CCD camera system for a new space mission. This is an experienced group that's done quite a few space missions, but this one is new, has a modest budget, and a short timeline. They're looking for help.
This is a group that appreciates flexibility and innovative thinking. This isn't going to be the usual aerospace development where one engineer does one small piece to rigid specifications. These folks will figure out how to use all your talents, even those you don't know you have yet. A small mission on a short fuse is the most fun kind of space development, and a student who comes in now will be "getting in on the ground floor". I note that a somewhat similar project (short fuse, modest budget, cutting edge astronomical instrumentation) at the same MIT lab became the senior thesis that launched my career 35(!) years ago. But I'm not the last student to have gotten a good bounce out of that environment. This group has made "smaller, faster, cheaper, better" actually work, see http://space.mit.edu/HETE/ (although that page is a bit out of date now). HETE-2 was a highly successful six year mission. And it was fun! But challenging, like this new mission. I'm writing this as the contractor for the mixed signal design and as a gEDA user. I recognize the strong MIT connections of the gEDA community. We have the following EE tasks to get done soon: Camera interface. Here, we want to use the "Camera Link" standard (http://www.alacron.com/downloads/vncl98076xz/CameraLinkSPEC.pdf). We've never used this before, but it appears to have virtues that would be a good match to our mission. The big thing here is an FPGA design to glue the mixed signal stuff to the interface, but there's also work to be done to acquire images in a form useful for subsequent processing using our Linux "Ground Support Equipment" setup. Camera drive and digitization electronics. This is nominally on my plate, and I'm hoping that I can adapt designs I already have in gEDA for most of it. Surely, though, there are changes needed, analyses to perform, and everything will need review and test (please, somebody, review my stuff: I'm performing without a net here...). I'm not going to be defensive about my turf: there'll be plenty for me to do even if MKI finds me plenty of help! There's plenty more. I can see UROP and thesis opportunities (any level) for students in Courses 6, 8, 12, 16 and maybe others. There are a lot of different kinds of problems that need solving to make a space mission work. If you are an interested student, please contact: George Ricker (Principal Investigator) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 37-535 x3-7532 or Roland Vanderspek (Project Scientist) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 37-527 x3-8456 If any other gEDA folks know a student who might be interested, please pass this message along. John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. http://www.noqsi.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
