Welcome to the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Capstone Student Projects Site
 Courses: ASEN 4018 and ASEN 4028 This site presents select Course Information and Deliverables from the Capstone Senior Design Projects |
NEWS and EVENTS
Senior Design Awards 2013
Today, May 10, 2013, the AES department gave the senior students the much deserved awards for excellent work during a very hard year of studying. The team and individual awards are listed in this FILE.
We wish all the students a very successful career in aerospace engineering.
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Aerospace Engineering Industry Symposium 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013, 8:00 am - 4:00 pm
The schedule with all presentations is available here:
Early registration will get you a free box lunch. Please fill out this registration form and email to patti.gassaway@colorado.edu or fax to Patti's attention 303-492-7881
The students and the faculty are looking forward to seeing you again, or meet you for the first time, and discuss some exciting high technology projects researched and developed by our very gifted students.
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DAYSTAR Project Balloon Flight
DAYSTAR -Diurnal Star Tracking for Balloon-borne Attitude Determination
http://media.kickstatic.com/kickapps/images/62902/photos/PHOTO_17599887_62902_42518891_ap.jpg
The DayStar capstone senior design team (AY 2011-12) developed a prototype daytime star tracking system capable of providing pointing knowledge to a diurnal, lighter-than-air platform. DayStar improved on current attitude determination devices used on high-altitude scientific balloon payloads by adding the ability to track stars and perform lost-in-space field identifications during daytime and improving the tracking accuracy at night to as little as 0.1" root mean square (rms).
Funding for the project came from Dr. Eliot Young of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. The motivation for the DayStar project comes from the need for daytime attitude determination on balloon-borne observatories. Dr. Young’s eventual goal of operating a one meter telescope from a balloon platform requires such a pointing accuracy of less than 0.1 arcseconds rms – five times more precise than that provided by current flight qualified telescopes. Senior students Jed Diller, Kevin Dinkel, Zach Dischner, Aaron Holt, Tyler Murphy, Sara Schuette, Michael Skeen, Nick Truesdale, and Andrew Zizi, under the mentorship of Prof. Scott Palo, conceived the star tracking system, designed it based on a full analytical systems engineering analysis, manufactured many essential components, and tested their instrument as one of the science payloads on the pictured balloon flight launched from Ft Sumner, NM, on the morning of Sept. 22, 2012.
Congratulations to our students for an excellent engineering job in support of exciting scientific studies!
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Projects for Academic Year 2012/13
This year's capstone senior design projects are listed here.
Industry sponsors are:
Lockheed Martin Corp, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp, Surrey Satellites US LLC, Escape Dybamics LLC, NASA-JPL, LASP.
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Aerospace Engineering Industry Symposium
April 20, 2012, 8:00 am - 4:00 pm
Download the program and see what our senior and graduate students can design!
- Congressman Polis' District Director Andy Schultheiss presented a message from the Congressman at 8:30 am.
- Senator Bennet's Senior Advisor Monisha Merchant presented a message from the Senator at 12:30 pm.
- Attendance was great! 70 visitors from industry (some flying in from out-of-State) including 16 parents. With faculty and ~80 students attending, each team had an audience of well beyond 100 people.
Companies represented at our Symposium (random order):
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United Launch Alliance
SEAKR Engineering
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation
Northrop-Grumman
Pikes Peak Community College
The Boeing Company
eSpace: The Center for Space Entrepreneurship
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology
NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory
James Fox Research
Sierra Nevada Corporation
Southwest Research Institute
Thank you for attending and helping us to make a statement of academic excellence.
AIAA Region V Student Paper Conference
April 4-6, 2012
In the Team category there were 17 papers/presentations from four universities. We are proud that our AES teams did sweep, for the 3rd year in a row, the first 3 prizes!
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1st and going to AIAA-ASM in January 2013
DayStar - Modeling the Daytime Performace of a Star Tracker for High Altitude Balloons
Presenters: Truesdale, Nick; Dinkel, Kevin; Skeen, Michael
2nd
FENIX - Fluid Extraction for Nozzle Injection eXperiement
Presenters: Bonnici, Michael;
Penmetsa, Naveen;
Shaw-Cortez, Wenceslao
3rd
SPEAR - Sounding Payload Ejection And Recovery
University: University of Colorado at Boulder
Presenters: Helfenbein, Carol;
Schlatter, Nicholas
Congratulations to all our students and presenters for a great effort and fabulous job. This includes all those who participated in the competition, which is the entire class. Thank you to Dr. Gerren for leading the local AIAA competition program and our teams to great success. Thanks to all PAB advisers who assured highest quality in all the papers that got submitted. To those teams that did not receive accolades I want to say: your learning experience in participating is well beyond the value of a prize.
Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory Design Expo
April 28, 2012
The STARR (Sample Targeting and Retrieval Rover) team received the highly competitive "People's Choice" Award at the public ITLL Design Expo.