L'SPACE MCA — Team 19: Ad Astra

MCANASA L'SPACE Mission Concept Academy—a 15-week program where interdisciplinary teams develop a preliminary mission concept following the NASA mission life cycle Team 19: Ad Astra formed around a concrete science objective: in-situ volatile characterization in a lunar PSRPermanently Shadowed Region—a crater area that never receives direct sunlight, with extreme cold and potential water-ice deposits. I stepped in as sole Lead Systems EngineerThe engineer responsible for integrating subsystem inputs, managing interfaces, and maintaining requirements traceability across the vehicle.

Early weeks were dominated by the SRRSystem Requirements Review—a milestone establishing the system requirements baseline, subsystem allocation, and interface control architecture. I authored the spacecraft overview, subsystem summary tableA top-level table listing each subsystem's mass, power, and dimensional budgets, and the requirements flow-down that linked Artemis-class science objectives to engineering constraints.

Interface work became my daily rhythm. I built a 19-pathway ICD matrixInterface Control Document matrix—tabular definition of every cross-subsystem signal, data product, and physical interface and an N² diagramA square matrix showing which subsystems exchange data or power with which—classic systems-engineering interface visualization. The narrative had to explain how LiDAR navigation, rotary-percussive sampling, and onboard spectrometry connected through the vehicle bus.

At MDRMission Definition Review—a milestone locking mission architecture, operational paradigm, and programmatic baseline I co-led research on alternative mission concepts with Chief Scientist Hannah Kim. We compared traverse strategies, communications windows, and science return profiles for volatile detection at Nobile Rim 2.

Thermal was unforgiving. PSR operations span roughly 40–394 KTemperature range from cryogenic shadowed regions to sun-exposed lunar surface—demanding careful heat-flow analysis and survival heating. I co-led the thermal subteam: requirements, heat-flow maps, and a formal trade studyStructured comparison of design options against mass, power, risk, and performance criteria against CDH options under PM Alejandro Gonzalez's review.

Science-to-engineering traceabilityThe disciplined mapping from science objectives → requirements → verification methods consumed parallel hours. Every instrument claim needed a path to a test or analysis that could prove we would detect volatiles in regolith, not just carry the right sensors.

PDRPreliminary Design Review—the milestone where subsystem designs are defended with enough fidelity to proceed toward detailed design is where I owned CDHCommand and Data Handling—the spacecraft subsystem that acquires, processes, stores, and downlinks science and engineering data. I wrote the requirements narrative, software architecture flowchart, TRLTechnology Readiness Level—NASA's 1–9 scale measuring how mature a technology is from concept to flight-proven baselines for sub-assemblies, recovery/redundancy plans, and the verification matrix for science data acquisition and S-band downlinkA common spacecraft radio band (~2–4 GHz) used for telemetry and science data transmission to Earth.

Pulling Engineering subteam inputs under PM review meant constant reconciliation—mass growth in one subsystem rippled into power, which rippled into thermal, which rippled into CDH duty cycles. I learned that the LSE role is less about owning one box and more about being the person who sees the whole graph.

We closed the academy with a defended PDR package and a certificate of completion for Team 19: Ad Astra. The rover concept—autonomous PSR volatile prospecting with LiDAR, spectrometry, and rotary-percussive sampling—was mine to explain as an integrated system, not a parts list.