a day in the life... Helen Mapson Menard
Senior Technologist at Birmingham University Department of Astrophysics and Space Science
Featuring: Scott Plant (15) and Mitchell Kenney (16)
10.15
It was a bit of a shocker meeting Helen. We thought she'd be an old lady with frizzy grey hair and specs and tweedy skirt, a sort of female nutty professor type, so it was great that she was the complete opposite to that!
We had a cup of coffee first and Helen briefed us on the day.
10.30
Helen had arranged for us to go into the Carbon Composites Clean Room. Being a clean room means wearing one of these white coats and covering your shoes with disposable plastic covers to avoid you bringing dust in and shedding too many fibres. We met a great bloke called Mark Paget who is the Head of Composites Department and a Carbon Composite specialist.
He explained all about how you make the material that satellite components are made of - you can't just buy it in the shops. Carbon fibre material is impregnated with special resin. The strands of the carbon are either woven like this bit he showed us or uni-directional, and to make a strong material you layer the uni-directional stuff over each other in different directions like on his sketch. To make really strong board you sandwich a layer of honeycomb aluminium between two composite boards - light and strong.
We made our very own bit of space material to see how it's done. So we got a bit of carbon fabric each (£5000 per roll it costs! So the bit we had was worth about £5 each). When you'recutting the fabric up you wear special chain mail gloves to stop you from slicing your fingers off. We cut the strips into precise (ish) squares then put all the about 16 squares on top of each other, pressing down each time with our hands to warm the resin and make it stickier.
11.45
After we'd done our bit Mark took over and prepared the pieces for the Autoclave which was a gigantic oven like thing in the corner of the room, which does heat and pressure.
The pieces were put on flat aluminium and then sealed over with releasematerial. Mark said nothing would stick to that. Scott said he bet his mum's cooking would!
12.15
At this point we had to leave our work to 'cook' for a few hours, so we went off to see the machine shop.
13.00
Next we walked out into the sunshine saw the famous university tower and went over to the staff diner for our lunch.
After lunch we sat in on a seminar of third year Astrophysics students who'd been given a project to design a satellite as a team. There were about 12 of them and they'd divided up into smaller teams to research various aspects of the satellite design.
Part of Helen's job at the university is to do some tutoring and one of the groups was hers. We felt like we knew as much about satellite design as any of the students after all our work!
Then it was back to Helen's office where she showed us her super computer where she does computer modeling to see how her camera and the satellite will work without having to build it yet. She's got some little models of satellites on her shelves as well! Just before we left we went to see if our pieces of carbon composite were ready to take with us, and we had a bit of a surprise. Mark had made our pieces into key rings for us, as a reminder of our day.
Brilliant! Thanks a lot Helen and Mark!
If you want to build your own satellite or learn more about them here's a site that you might like!
http://www.thetech.org/exhibits/online/satellite/home.html
To find out more about Helen visit the www.noisenet.ws site.
Covering your shoes
The reason for that is the material that satellites are made out of has to be as perfect as possible 'cos you won't be going up there to mend it after it's gone! No flaws allowed.
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Sketch
You have to plan what you want to make to the exact millimeter and know every single surface and join and strut and everything because the material is so expensive! So design really comes into it too.
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Autoclave
First the carbon composite package is vacuumed out to a pressure of about 20 psi then put in the autoclave to a temperature of 170 and a pressure of 100 psi - well and truly squashed! This is where the resin in the carbon fibres melts and hardens.
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Machine Shop
They make two of all the projects that get launched, this is the test version that doesn't have to be in a clean room because the whole point of it is it gets tested to destruction! It's to see if there are any design flaws before the real thing gets made. The photo shows the test box to house the camera which will be sending information back to earth about the light from the sun. It is Helen's project and the camera is called Stereo, and will one day be up there on a satellite in space.
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