In my Junior year of college, I had the pleasure of joining the software team of the Telescope Housing Event-based Imaging Apparatus (THEIA) project at UMD. This project was under the university's Satellite Development Program in the Space Systems Laboratory. The task of this project was to build a CubeSat that tests the ability of an event-based camera technology to be a high-performance star-tracker in space. My job on the software team was to work on satellite behavior and integration of avionics and hardware components, specifically during experimentation phases.
During this experience, I feel that my most impactful contributions came in two ways, the creation of a high level overview of satellite behavior in and around experimentation as well as communication between the sub teams of this project. When I first joined this team, I noticed that many of the sub teams were acting individually, which meant that many important details were being left out of communications, and roadblocks existed between teams that slowed progress. Upon my joining of this team, however, I quickly bridged the gaps of team communication, working to transfer important documentation into the right hands to ensure that all information was up to date and where it needed to be.
This effective communication also worked greatly in my favor to benefit one of my tasks for the satellite, which was to design a high level overview of behavior around experimentation. This task relied heavily on communication and strategic planning, as all the different teams working on this project had restrictions and limitations surrounding what the satellite needed to be able to do during experimentation. Communications needed to be maintained while checking for sources of danger during payload experimentation, and the orientation of the satellite had to be correct in order to get accurate data for the payload. Another main issue was that the payload intentionally lost communication during experimentation, and it was crucial to devise a plan to ensure that connection could be restored if something went wrong.
