ESA Academy Experiments team VITA passes Preliminary Design Review
Last week, team VITA of Nottingham University successfully passed a very important milestone in their project, their Preliminary Design Review. Team VITA intends to investigate on-demand cell-free protein synthesis on the International Space Station. The project is part of the ESA Academy Experiments opportunities, which teaches university students using project based approach how to develop hardware for various space-related facilities.
VITA is a team of university students who proposed an exciting experiments which would investigate the feasibility of producing proteins on demand in space. The long-term goal would be to eventually generate therapeutic proteins which could be stored long term on board spacecrafts and synthesized anew when required. While the concept is easy enough to understand, the implementation is rather more complicated.
The science
For the past several months the team worked hard to ensure that the biological components required to initiate the synthesis were sufficiently stable so that they would survive long-term storage. After months and months of hard work, trial and error, the team managed to prepare and stabilize the components in such a way that the stability of the components was sufficient to fulfil the project’s objectives.
The engineering
Building a piece of hardware for the International Space Station’s ICE Cubes Facility requires a lot of considerations. Will the hardware survive the launch? Will it still be capable of operating nominally in microgravity, will the communications with the experiment be established and maintained? Will the biological read out be of sufficient quality? Will the experiment not pose any threats to the astronauts on board?
With fluidics and many samples that the team want to test, the experiment development on the engineering front took quite some work and prototyping also. Many iterations were discussed between team VITA, ESA Academy and Space Applications Services. After several months of discussions and tests in their university labs, the team proposed a good design which was reviewed by experts at ESA and Space Applications Services.
The preliminary design review
The objective of this review is to establish that the experiment that the team intend to build will perform its duties with good confidence and very little safety risk. In order to fulfil this review, the students had to submit a datapack consisting of several documents covering all aspects of the experiment. Design Reports, Operations Manuals, Bill of Materials and Project Management Plans were some of the documents reviewed by specialists and any issues identified were raised with the students. Discussions, explanations and clarifications from experts to students and students to experts were exchanged over several weeks and once all points were identified and clarified, the team was granted a Preliminary Design Review (PDR) pass.
Next up is the detailed design phase which will culminate in the Critical Design Review (CDR). After this review, there will be very few changes, if any, to the design and the team can start building the flight and engineering models. Exciting times ahead!