PILOT EDUCATIONAL PROJECT TO FOSTER INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION IN SPACE SYSTEMS DESIGN

This paper describes a recent collaborative project between two universities in different countries that was used as a mechanism to illustrate the opportunities and challenges inherent in international projects. There are numerous examples of international collaboration that can be drawn from the aerospace industry; however engineering courses focused upon the design of space systems rarely have the opportunity to incorporate some form of international collaboration into the course material. The pilot program described in this paper engaged two classes of senior undergraduate and early graduate-level engineering students enrolled in space systems design courses respectively in California and Barcelona. They were collectively challenged to create a mission design for a space science mission of interest to the international space community. In order to develop a cohesive mission concept the students were required to overcome disparate school schedules, a large time zone difference, and a language barrier in much the same way as is done within the aerospace industry. No additional funding was made available to the students for collaborative tools beyond an existing university-managed web portal for file sharing and communication. The use of this web portal, along with other freely-available internet products, was an important educational outcome of the collaborative project.
A central challenge explored during this educational endeavor was that of bridging differences in course material taught at the participating universities. One school uses a quarter-based academic calendar in which the course is only taught for one ten week period, while the other school uses semesters and offers a year-long space systems design course. Thus, the students participating in the project were equipped with different levels of knowledge about different areas of space systems technology, and had to self-organize into work groups that were appropriate to the distribution of knowledge. Despite the wide range of challenges, the participating students developed a preliminary design study for a mission to explore the so-called Trojan objects that (approximately) share Jupiter’s orbit, at the L4 and L5 libration points. Management of the project was shared between students at both universities, and the information included in the study has since been presented at professional conferences in both the United States and Spain. In this paper we describe the organization and implementation of this pilot international collaborative project, and make recommendations for future educational efforts of this kind.