Deployment of Cabling on Hypothesized Surface – Endurance

INSTITUTION

Penn State University (PSU)

CLASS

Platinum Class (2025 – 2026)

STUDENT TEAM

ACADEMIC GUIDANCE

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

NASA’s Psyche Mission was an orbiter mission to the metal-rich asteroid, 16 Psyche, in the Main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft, which will arrive in mid-2029, will study theone-of-a-kind asteroid from orbit and gather scientific data. In the meantime, senior capstone teams from around the country are developing concepts for future missions to 16 Psyche. The objective of this project was to create a design concept for a cable deployment system to deploy a 1-kilometerlong fiber optic cable across 16 Psyche’s surface for a hypothesized low-frequency radio telescope array. With a focus on repeatability and longevity in 16 Psyche’s extreme environment, the team created a rocker-bogie rover design to carry, lay out, secure, and reload fiber optic cable spools from a surface lander.

View Full Poster

View Project Page

This work was created in partial fulfillment of the Penn State University Capstone Course “ME 448.” The work is a result of the Psyche Student Collaborations component of NASA’s Psyche Mission (https://psyche.ssl.berkeley.edu). “Psyche: A Journey to a Metal World” [Contract number NNM16AA09C] is part of the NASA Discovery Program mission to solar system targets. Trade names and trademarks of ASU and NASA are used in this work for identification only. Their usage does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, by Arizona State University or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ASU or NASA.