Space Apps Challenge 2018

You might be wondering what we were doing these past three days, or two and a half days, and we are here to explain to you everything you want to know about our fabulous idea 😉

So, buckle up, and listen carefully.

1. We chose the category “Let’s build a…”, with the challenge “Design by Nature”.

We designed a free flyer that can inspect the damage of the spacecrafts from mini meteorites and orbit debris, with the help of ion thrusters and a LIDAR sensor.

In the past, NASA had to build a special device, actually a whole system, to inspect the damage of an aircraft, which took enormous amounts of time, effort and cost to find and locate a damage. But, our innovation is universal, efficient, low cost, and sustainable, and they wouldn’t need to build a special system for every single spacecraft, which saves huge amounts of time.

Our innovation is not only efficient and low cost, but also a solution with great prospective, which means it can be used for the years, and decades to come.

1. We chose the characteristics based on a couple of criteria, which included: sustainability, environment friendliness, money usage, and prospective.

The flyer will be powered by a battery, which will be charged on the spacecraft itself, using the solar panels of the spacecraft. When we compare the huge amounts of money spent on spacecraft and space device building with NASA, which spends millions and billions of dollars, our innovation would cost only 4000$. This is really, really cheap, and NASA would be happy to hear about this. Furthermore, our flyer can scan the ISS in a mere 10 minutes, which is no-time compared to previous scanning methods. When it comes to look, it would be gorgeous, of course.

1. You might have been wondering how does this whole thing work. First, NASA makes a 3D model from the spacecraft that it will be sent to space, clean and flawless as it is. Then, the 3D model is converted to a terrain model of the aircraft, and the terrain image is installed on a system (computer) on the spacecraft. After the free flyer goes around the spacecraft, and scans the whole thing, it finds the differences between the original terrain image and the actual terrain image, if there’s any damage, of course. After it finds the differences, it signals the spacecraft staff, and the spacecraft is ready for actual reconstruction or repair, or what the astronauts decide to do.

1. When it comes to why is our idea useful, there are a lot of point to point out.

• It eliminates the danger of astronauts going outside the spacecrafts, which is a big life-saver.
• It is autonomous which saves time and resources
• It prevents bigger damage and problems
• The damages will be marked and the spacecraft staff will know how and where to approach the problem
• The problem of using a huge amount of money will be solved by detecting the problem earlier
• A sustainable solution for the years to come

With this short presentation, we would like to end the briefing for our idea, but as you challenged us, we challenge you to ask us questions.

Thank you for you interest.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NDd-uF8PzQmwrkXv... - This is a summary of all of our work on his project