Design Of Intelligent Spacecraft: An Interdisciplinary Engineering Education Course

This paper discusses a highly interdisciplinary course offered to students during the Spring 2007 semester : Design of Intelligent Spacecraft. The course integrates concepts from mathematics, physics, engineering and computer science for the purpose of educating 4th year undergraduate and introductory masters-level students on the design of intelligent spacecraft. Course content is divided into two pedagogically separate parts : 1. The historical development of physical models, including mathematical models for celestial mechanics and thermodynamics. 2. Application of these models for creating intelligent spacecraft, i.e., applications of these models to pattern recognition, computer vision, and image processing. The first section introduces physical mathematical models which, in the second section of the course, are re-visited to allow for model-based design. In part (1), a new tact is taken for teaching the historical development of mathematics and physics that shapes the scientific view of the world today. Lectures seek to emphasize the rationale behind scientific thought through the variety of personalities that have defined it best characterized by the phrase : All science was new at some point. Specific classical topics include celestial mechanics and thermodynamics which are introduced using excerpts from original works of the scientists that defined and revolutionized our understandings of these fields. Some scientists considered are Aristotle, Tycho, Kepler, Newton, Euler, Bernoulli, Fourier and other scientists relevant to course topics. Where possible, original manuscripts were provided and clarified by reformulating the work in modern terminology and mathematical notation. Historical content is complemented with discussion on contemporary space missions relevant to the discussion topic. For example, historical discussions on the discoveries of Cassini or Galileo includes discussions on the recent Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. Further, these discussions include mission spacecraft type, its relevant design considerations and mission objectives. Discussion of mission objectives serve to highlight current boundaries of scientific knowledge and how specific space missions seek to understand topics at these boundaries. In part (2), students implemented programs relevant to spacecraft design. Programs included physical simulations of celestial mechanics, thermodynamics, and signal processing programs for image manipulation and signal compression. Project topics reinforce topics covered in part (1) of the course. Results for physical simulations are compared against theoretically perfect results for thermodynamic simulations and established gold-standards from NASA’s HORIZONS system in P ge 13371.2 the case of celestial mechanics. Applications of these mathematical models in electrical engineering lead to signal processing projects which motivate subsequent course topics on communication, image processing and image compression. This paper includes successes, failures and lessons learned in teaching a course with such diverse content and analyzes how well the mixture of history / engineering was received by the students.