Radiation Hardened Spacecraft

Design Challenge

Artist rendition of Van Allen Probes flying over earth

The Details

You have been approved by NASA to build and launch your radiation-hardened spacecraft. Your spacecraft will need subsystems and instruments, such as a hard drive to store the data before transmitting, a radio antenna to transmit data back to Earth and receive commands from Mission Operations, a particle spectrometer to gather the unique type of data you will collect in the Van Allen radiation belts, solar panels to supply power to the spacecraft and instruments, and another subsystem of your choice. You will also be testing various materials to see which is best suited to survive in the Van Allen radiation belts, and that material will be used to make all of the other instruments and subsystems on your spacecraft. You have a lot of decisions to make, so let's get started by learning a bit more about where your spacecraft is headed and what it will be exploring!

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