MERV

Mission Exploration and Research of Venus is a project ran by a group of students at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in the Undergraduate Team Space Design Competition RFP – Human Enabled Venus Robotic Exploration held by AIAA.

The concept of the mission is develop a near-surface Venus balloon hovering around the goldilocks zone around 45-55km from the Venusian surface to collect scientific data on the atmosphere and analyze the minerals and surface composition while being supported by a crew of 4 orbiting around Venus in a 30 day time span.

Team Members

1. Michael Quach - Program Manager (mdquach@cpp.edu)
2. Francisco Sanudo - Deputy Project Manager (fjsanudo@cpp.edu)
3. Eric Ruf - ADCS Lead (erruf@cpp.edu)
4. Alejandro Wuence - COMMs Lead (awuence@cpp.edu)
5. Rene Holmes - Propulsion Lead (rjholmes@cpp.edu)
6. JD Morrisey - Payload Lead (jdmorrissey@cpp.edu)
7. Alton Lo - Structures Lead (altonlo@cpp.edu)
8. Peter Ho - Systems Engineering Lead (pkho@cpp.edu)
9. Harold Hernandez - Thermal Lead (hghernandez@cpp.edu)

Tool Utilized

1. MATLAB
2. Ansys STK
3. Solidworks
4. Ansys Mechanical
5. Blender
6. Genesis
7. VIRA atmospheric model
8. Python
9. Julia