Guest Scholars Design Future Venus Missions
During the summer of 2013, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Campus hosted 64 Bhose and Khorana Scholars for an intensive eleven week graduate research immersion experience focused on STEM (Science, Techonology, Engineering and Mathematics) projects. The Bose and Khorana Scholars programs are the result of a partnership formed in 2007, that includes the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, the Government of India, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Founding Directors, Asseem Ansari (Biochemistry) and Ken Shapiro (Agriculture and Applied Economics) facilitate the exchange and placement of research students between research universities in both nations.
In the past, many of the students have been hosted by the UW-Madison College of Engineering faculty. For the first time, in the summer of 2013, SSEC welcomed three of these aspiring young scholars: Mofeez Alam, Kumar Ashish, and Nishant Udgaonkar.
With guidance from Sanjay Limaye, Rosalyn Pertzborn and Tommy Jasmine, as well as Northrup Grumman Aerospace System’s Kristen Griffen, the students were presented with the task of designing and evaluating atmospheric instrument platform concepts to optimize data collection for future Venus exploration missions. The primary design challenge for Venusian atmospheric exploration is to develop an instrument payload platform vehicle that can sustain power at various key altitudes, with some maneuverability in the planet’s hostile environment.
Engineering student, Mofeez Alam and Physics major Kumar Ashish worked together to formulate several vehicle concepts including a plane, blimp and tethered balloon(s).
Mofeez Alam and Kumar Ashish in a teleconference with representatives of Northrup Grumman.
Photo by Sanjay Limaye.
After modeling tests for these various vehicles, they arrived at the hybrid concept of a blimp and an airplane as the most promising instrument platform for optimal collection of data at multiple levels, under the challenging conditions presented by the Venus atmospheric environment. In a key supporting effort, Nishant Udgaonkar who is majoring in Computer Science, worked with Tommy Jasmine to improve the Venus Winds animations using atmospheric data from the still operational Venus Express Mission (ESA).
As a result of the team’s efforts, the “BlimPlane,” hybrid of a Blimp and Airplane, will be proposed for future Venus exploration. The unique and original concept will be presented by Mr. Mofeez Alam (Indian Institute of Space and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, India) and Mr. Kumar Ashish (Indian Institute of technology, Kharagpur, India), with Dr. Sanjay Limaye at the National Conference on Advancement in Physics, Mathematics and Engineering later this year in Pune, India.
submitted by Rosalyn Pertzborn
