Fetching Saturn (Part 1)

Part 1: The Challenge

This semester for my graduate program we designed a space exploration mission. There were enough students to form two teams that would compete each other on the same objective. In the end, the agreed mission was a sample return mission from Saturn. That's right...go to Saturn, get a piece of something from Saturn, and bring it back to earth.

I thought to myself that this is an impossible task. If it was possible some space agency would have pulled this off by now. Other missions have captured material from comets (like Stardust), but never as far out as Saturn. After my dream of failure was over and I started breathing again I started to work with our team on how this was going to be done.

In the second class meeting we received the official RFP (request for propsal) on the mission. We were given our "escape hatch" for the sample return requirement. The RFP stated that if we couldn't return a sample from Saturn we could just do analysis at Saturn and send back the results (data).

Well, that was a relief, but we didn't cave in that quickly. There's so much in designing a space exploration project.

• How are you going to get there?
• What are you going to launch on?
• How are communications going to be handled?
• What about issues during the mission?
• When are you going to launch and when will you arrive at the destination?
• etc

As you could imagine the feeling of being overwhelmed set in quickly. As a team we divided up specific responsibilities to team members. We had to keep in mind that there's another team who might be developing a better way to accomplish the objective.

In Part 2, I'll go over what our team chose to study on Saturn.