CNES (the French National Center for Space Research) was responsible for the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, the Rosetta Project, and now Pascal Martinelli, who supervised the conception and manufacturing of that satellite, has helped a group of French students do their part to make a new aerospace project happen.
“It’s a practical tool to get students at engineering schools and universities more involved in space sciences,” says Alain Gaboriaud, the project leader at CNES.
In all, the EyeSat required nearly 400 3D printed parts throughout the 14 iterations of the prototyping process, and the CNES used Sculpteo’s 3D printing services to build those parts.
The project also made use of 3D printed parts for more than just the prototyping stage of the effort. The final version of the satellite included 3D printed components. The technology was used to print four mounting brackets and a sunvisor.
“3D printing is not necessarily the first manufacturing technique that comes to mind when you’re designing a satellite. Engineers are still lacking some experience with it and that’s one of the reasons why it’s not used as much as it should be to produce the final EYESAT satellite,” Martinelli says. “The other reason however is more down to earth. Polyamide even when not 3D printed can absorb 5% of its weight in water, which means water can get inside the material. While in space, any moisture would turn into condensation on the lenses of the camera resulting in degraded images. That’s why we still need to test 3D printed parts for this.”
“For the manufacturing of models it would have been impossible to plan this series of 12 units for the deadlines granted to this operation,” said Martinelli. “The project are difficult to fund, and even if 3D printing isn’t economically efficient in every case, in this particular case, it was the only way to meet our budget.”
This project, a collaboration between student engineers and CNES, certainly saw a huge boost thanks to 3D printing. Do you know about any other aerospace projects which use 3D printing? Let us know in the EyeSat Project forum thread on 3DPB.com.