This past week, Loudon and I began cleaning the flat-sat’s fasteners. We buzzed the bolts and screws in an ultrasonic cleaner to get them clean and not damage the electronics in the flat-sat; when the screws were done we took them out and dried them with nitrogen gas and sealed them in clean bags to be used later.
We used a UV laser engraver to cut out the stencil that we designed on solid works. Before cutting out the stencil we cut out a few practice shapes to see the settings to perfectly cut out the stencil.
We also began testing the epoxy that we are going to use on the solar panels. The epoxy has been mixed with small glass balls and put into a freezer so that the epoxy did dry. The glass balls are there to set the height of the dry epoxy; the height is set at 0.005 inches. When testing the epoxy we tried 2 methods. The first method we tried we overfilled the stencil holes and then squeegeed away the exes epoxy, and the second method was trying to fill in the right amount of epoxy by hand. After we put the epoxy where we wanted it, we took off the stencil and placed another glass slide on top of the epoxy, and let it dry.
The next day we looked at the epoxy through an optical comparator to see how the 2 different methods affected the epoxy. When using the squeegee there were air bubbles and with the no-squeegee method, there was some exes epoxy that dried. after examining the two slides we concluded that we should not use the squeegee method because the air bubbles mean that there is less surface area that is touching the epoxy and less holding them into the cube sat.
After work on Friday Loudon and I drove back to Telluride for the 4th of July, and when we get back to LASP we are going to bake the slides and put them into a vacuum chamber to see how the conditions of space affect the epoxy. This past week I feel like I have learned a lot and I am excited for next week.
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