Eleri works on the thermal design and qualification of small spacecraft, which is to say she spends her time on the part of a space programme that arrives late and decides everything.
Her group runs assembly, integration and test as a discipline rather than a phase. A written procedure, an agreed pass criterion and a named person who can stop the test are, she maintains, worth more than any amount of pre-test analysis performed in the hope of avoiding the test.
She is direct about the commonest failure in small-satellite programmes: a team designs for a year, then discovers that the thermal-vacuum chamber it needs is booked for six months and that the test procedure will take four weeks to write and review. The hardware is fine. The calendar has already decided the outcome.
Having previously worked in industry on platform integration, she is unusually comfortable with the paperwork that qualification demands, and rather good at explaining to a first-time team why it exists.
Selected projects
Named work, with a sentence of context each.
6U platform thermal redesign
Reworked the thermal design of a small platform after a first campaign showed the payload exceeding its limit during eclipse exit, largely by rearranging conductive paths rather than adding hardware.
Qualification procedure template
Produced a reusable thermal-vacuum procedure template for first-time payload teams, which has since removed several weeks from three separate campaigns.
Contamination and outgassing review
Reviewed material selection for an optical payload and identified two components whose outgassing would have degraded the primary optic in orbit.
Working with Vaughan
The first conversation is about the calendar. Which facility, which slot, who signs the procedure, and what the pass criteria are. She would rather spend an hour on that than a month on analysis that the test will supersede.
She is content to work with teams whose design is unfinished, and considerably less useful once the structure has been manufactured. Early is cheap here.
Looking for
Payload teams approaching their first qualification campaign, ideally before the design is frozen.
Probably not for
Programmes hoping to shorten a test campaign by analysis alone. She has watched that argument lose.
Credits and contributions
- Test conductor on nine small-satellite qualification campaigns
- Industrial experience in platform assembly, integration and test
- Contributor to a university guide on small-spacecraft test practice