Our First SkyHopper Interns

We would like to give a warm welcome to our winter Interns, Lauren Jessup and Jack McRobbie. Lauren and Jack are both University of Melbourne students and are working on Melbourne Uni’s first student cubesat in the student run Melbourne Space Program. Lauren studies Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Melbourne and has studied both physics and teaching in New Zealand, while Jack is an undergraduate physics student. We are excited to have both of them on board for the winter break.

These internships are an opportunity for highly motivated students to contribute to the development of the SkyHopper Rapid Response Telescope project, and gain experience working in an international scientific collaboration. They will be developing their knowledge and understanding of concepts related to aerospace engineering and particularly how these can apply to science missions.

Lauren is working on optimising the deployment angle of our thermal radiators given a number of different possible observing strategies, taking into consideration the thermal environment and properties of the telescope, and the mechanical constraints imposed by the cubesat specification. Jack will be spending his time building the framework of a mission power simulator, so that we can test out different observing strategies while ensuring that the telescope has a net power gain in the batteries over the course of a day.

Both Jack and Lauren are interested in the bridge between physics and engineering and how the theoretical knowledge they’ve been studying can be applied to real world science missions.

Welcome to the team, Lauren and Jack!