During the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Cornell I worked as a mechanical engineering intern at Honeybee Robotics‘ Exploration Technologies Group (ETG) in Pasadena, California. During my time there, the bulk of my work was on the end-to-end sampling system which Honeybee is building for Dragonfly, the New Frontiers mission proposal to send a rotorcraft lander to Saturn’s moon Titan.

I developed designs for flight-like hardware to address new mission requirements which flight heritage designs could not address, as well as hardware for preliminary integration testing deliverables to Goddard Space Flight Center. In addition to my work on hardware deliverables, I also designed and procured a test fixture to validate that a flight heritage design would remain valid in Titan’s cryogenic (-180℃) environment, as well as other designs we were exploring to address the new mission requirements.

I participated in weekly telecons with Honeybee’s customers for the project at Goddard and APL, communicating changes which our designs would need of their systems and working to narrow down their requirements and desires of my design. During the procurement of my test fixture and deliverable hardware I released 10+ part drawings which were reviewed to NASA’s drawing standards. I also utilized my skills in the machine shop to fabricate/modify procured components in order to save Honeybee a significant amount of money on a number of procured components.