Students design a mission to Venus on the cheap

Sometimes, the best way to learn how to do something is just to do it. That is especially true if you’re learning to do something using a specific methodology. And in some cases, the outcome of your efforts is something that’s interesting to other people.

A team from across the European Union, led by Ph.D. candidate Domenico D’Auria, spent a few days last September performing just such an exercise—and their work resulted in a mission architecture known as the Planetary Exploration Deployment and Research Operation—Venus, or PEDRO-V. Their paper is available on the arXiv preprint server.

The workshop the team presented in was the 11th International Systems & Concurrent Engineering for Space Applications Conference, and their focus was on completing the “Concurrent Engineering Challenge” held last year by the ESA Academy, ESA’s educational outreach program. The challenge tasked teams with developing a mission architecture using the principles of a concept known as concurrent engineering (CE).

Concurrent engineering focuses on parallelizing the engineering development process, utilizing separate specialized teams that work toward their own technical objectives while communicating with other teams to facilitate quick, inexpensive development. ESA seems particularly interested in CE for its ability to lower the cost of developing missions and prototypes and speed up the time it takes to complete design tasks.

To try out the methodology, the student team designed PEDRO-V, a mission intended to test different materials for use on the Venusian surface. The challenge resulted in several iterations of PEDRO-V’s design that honed in on the necessary capabilities and attempted to minimize the weight (and, therefore, the cost) of the overall spacecraft.

PEDRO-V was designed to complete its mission by providing a mothership carrying 20 1U CubeSats to Venus’ orbit. Once in orbit, it would release them into the atmosphere over the course of six months, with each small CubeSat sending back data about its performance to the mothership, which then transmitted it back to Earth.

As might be expected due to the challenge, CE took a central role in both the design process and in the report the team presented at the conference. The paper describes different areas of discipline, such as attitude and orbital control, and communications. It also details the process of iteratively modifying the design to adapt to a better understanding of the mission requirements and attempting to lower the weight.

The team’s final design had a launch mass of just under 1,300 kg, which isn’t bad for a mission to Venus. Displaying the changes in that mass over the different design iterations also provides some interesting insight into how the CE iterative process goes.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of PEDRO-V actually getting a chance to fly to Venus is relatively slim. However, it was developed as part of a training program, and it has certainly accomplished its job. As space exploration more generally shifts to faster design cycles, the skills the research team honed as part of the Challenge will become more valuable. There will be plenty more need for them in the future.