V.I.B.E., Senior Design

For my senior design project, I worked on a team with four others designing an interstellar probe, the V.I.B.E., with the objective to explore and acquire data from outside our solar system. The probe was specifically designed to study phenomena such as the bow shock, hydrogen wall, Kuiper Belt, and heliopause. I was solely responsible for designing the power system for the vehicle as well as assisting in the design of the payload and CD&H system. The power system I chose was an optimized General Purpose Heat Source Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (GPHS-RTG), which uses Plutonium-238 dioxide as its fuel.