Description
As thermal and financial lead, I worked through the trade space for keeping electronics and mechanisms within operating temperature on the lunar surface. I compared ceramic fiber insulation, heat shielding, radiators, and thermoelectric coolers while weighing mass, power draw, reliability, and prototype feasibility.
On the financial side, I led cost estimation and budgeting under a $2,000 manufacturing constraint. A key prototype decision was replacing an out-of-budget LIBS spectrometer with a low-cost sensing analog: a Raspberry Pi 3B+ running a camera and servo with a machine learning model trained on basic terrain-image classes. The goal was not to replicate true composition sensing, but to create a functional prototype stand-in for in-situ terrain identification.