My internships: BASiX Mission Proposal
My internships and the BASiX Mission Proposal for NASA Discovery program (Project Investigator D. J. Scheeres, University of Colorado in Boulder)
The BASiX mission is an active seismic study of a binary asteroid.
My interest for aerospace studies and for earth sciences made me contact Professor Lognonné for my first internship. Professor Lognonné welcomed me in his laboratory during the summer of 2010, at the Institute of Globe Physics in Paris (IPGP, Space and Planetary Geophysics, with P. Lognonné). My mission was to design and build an experiment which would simule the micro gravity and reproduce the behavior of a small lander (pod which contains the sismometer) on a granular soil (dust, regolith).
The main point of my internship was to study the buring capacity of the vibrations of the geophones (the sismometers) used as actuators. I therefore designed and 3D-printed a real-size pod within which I could settle the sismometers in different ways. I also design 3 electronic cards (the power supply card, the CPU card and the communication card) which are plugged one to another (so the electronic hardware is modulable) and control the geophones (actuator or sensor mode).
The experiment showed an imperceptible movement of the pod and an unexpected -but very trivial indeed- effect: the static effect of the pod and the polystyrene balls I used to model the granular soil in a low gravity field...
As I like to compare the theory with the experiment I kept inquiring about the burying capacity of the geophone after my internship was finished. I therefore showed that according to the different masses in action, the movement of the whole pod would not be sufficient to bury the struture (see the theoretical part of my internship report).
June - August 2010
June - August 2011
Looking for a second internship I asked Professor Lognonné if he knew people in the US (I wanted to do an internship in another country and I had already lived one year in the US so I wanted to go back there). He recommended to the Project Investigator of the BASiX mission, Professor D. J. Scheeres, who accepted to welcome me in his laboratory.
During this second internship, I had to study the behavior of the pod after the arrival of the seismic wave created by the initial blast. I computed the path of the pod after his ejection. Couple behaviors can be distinguished: or the pod is ejected, or it has a balistic flight and comes back on the asteroid. A relation between the landing spot of the pod and the characteristic of the seismic wave such as its amplitude can be found (see my report for more details).