Introduction
Payton M -
Hi everyone! My name is Payton Miller and welcome to my blog! From watching Nova’s Documentary series Universe Revealed to Aerospace Club here at school, I have been fascinated with space ever since I was a young child, and I will be studying aerospace engineering in college. From our ancient ancestors, we have always looked up at space—the final frontier, the source of human captivation—and wondered about our place in the universe.
Our modern world faces many pressing issues: access to clean water, global warming, high energy costs; the list goes on. I am a strong advocate for being proactive rather than reactive. As pioneers engineering the next technological innovations we will devise solutions to problems we do not yet have. It seems counter-intuitive, but to achieve unknown solutions to our issues on Earth, we need to investigate the unknown regions of space, much like how computers and CAT scans were subsequently made from our journey to the moon. However, one of the biggest hindrances to these missions is the cost. Every single aspect of the mission must be created with cost-efficiency at the forefront of the design; one major way to cut costs is to minimize fuel consumption.
After researching multiple topics within aerospace engineering, I became excited about orbital mechanics and how space missions were designed. My project focuses on comparing, contrasting, and designing different orbital trajectories to the dwarf planet Eris with a primary focus on minimizing fuel expenses. I began this project over the summer when I started working with my external advisor, Joskua Carrillo Cuevas, a Propulsion Design Engineer at Boeing and Akash Joseph, my Capstone Aerospace Engineering Sciences teacher. Additionally, I will be using resources at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, AZ, to create a simulation of the final trajectory.
Exploring the dwarf planet Eris and its orbital path around the Sun would allow us to investigate the outer reaches of the solar system. Eris travels through a region beyond Pluto and the Oort Cloud that has yet to be explored by a spacecraft. The elements there have been relatively untouched by the effects of our sun, so they exist in the same form as around the time of when our solar system formed. There are many anomalies and mysteries to the current state of our solar system; understanding the sequence of events that led to it will give us insight into the possibilities for the existence of life elsewhere in our galaxy and the universe. Sending spacecraft with appropriate instrumentation into this region to collect data is one method to explore these mysteries.
Thank you for reading, and I can’t wait to share what I’ve done so far with this project, and what I plan to achieve during the coming months in next week’s post! If you’re interested in more details, please see my project proposal linked below:
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