07 Aug Isaias Gutierrez, Lasp, Week 7

Hello everyone, this was my seventh and final week at LASP, and it was hands down one of the best weeks of the whole pinternship! I honestly can’t believe it’s already over, but I made sure to go out with a bang, both in the lab and outside of it.

The week kicked off with me jumping back onto the Mantis 3D printed model. I worked on the 3D printed instrument pieces earlier in the internship, but this week we reprinted some instruments and finished the model off (mostly)

To test the antenna we made a full sized model of MANTIS  out of aluminum. It was a long proccess with lots of difficult screws and hours of work but we got it in the end, I spent a a long time tapping holes, then drilling them out, then screwing, measuring, and doing it all over again on the aluminum solar panels and the aluminum Mantis model. It became such a repetitive rhythm by the end of the week that I could probably do it in my sleep: measure tap, drill, screw, repeat

I also got to 3d print a cannon, Dmitry said it was the last week so we should do somthing fun which was why I obviously designed a cannon using old springs laying around. It was honestly one of the most fun builds of the week, the testing different springs and balls and handles to see which ones were the best. After breaking a few handles with the amount of tension needed to shoot it and all the balls being lost Thomas and i figured it out.

On the asteroid sample side,  I made a stage for the asteroid sample project so we could angle the sample in a way so the light reflected would bounce up into the spectrograph. Using this we analyzed  gold and aluminum samples, exactly the same process we used with the Teflon sample from the previous weeks, comparing reflectance and calibrating it the same way. It was cool being able to apply the same method I’d learned earlier in the internship to a totally different material. Alongside that, I kept helping Anthony with his purge box, adding onto the hinges and handle work we’d started the week before.

One of my favorite moments was going into the big clean room, where they introduced me to the vacuum tank, who apparently has a name: Jimmy. We got to see the EMM being built which was such a cool thing to see

We also took the INFUSE rocket out of the chamber this week and started loading up the truck that’s headed to Wallops with the INFUSE rocket for the upcoming launch prep. Watching all the pieces get carefully packed and strapped in for the trip really made it feel real that this rocket is actually getting sent off to space soon.

And, because no week at LASP is complete without a little chaos, the cart for the Sprite CubeSat had its tire go flat on the clean table again, so we ended up building a stand on the fly just to keep everything stable and moving.

Outside of work, I rewatched The Odyssey again with alex, and it was just as good the second time around. Between that, wrapping up the summer with the LASP crew, and soaking in the last few days of the pinternship, it was the perfect way to close out an incredible seven weeks.

This internship has honestly changed how I think about engineering, teamwork, and what it actually looks like to build things that go to space. Huge thanks to Dmitry, Brian, Brianna, MIKEE and everyone else at LASP who taught me so much this summer. I’m going to miss this place a lot!