ELFIN SATELLITE

elfin picture.jpg

currently orbiting earth around us

I worked on UCLA’s first satellite project, called ELFIN — Electron Losses and Fields Investigation, which was a 3U+ CubeSat launched to study space weather and things like the Northern Lights. On ELFIN, I worked on the mechanical design on the main payload, called the Energetic Particle Detectors. I designed a lot of the PEEK brackets that attach the payload to the chassis, and also some of the PCB board designs for the main Instruments stack. This involved lots of Solidworks designing and working with Fabrication to design for manufacturability.

ELFIN successfully launched on September 15, 2018 on the last Delta II from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (part of the ICESat-2 mission) and is currently orbiting Earth around us.