The Micro-G teams for 2016 and 2017 did amazing work and we hope to follow un their footsteps!

We’re extremely excited to introduce this year’s Micro-G team!

The Mission

Zip ties are commonly used on payloads and hardware outside of the International Space Station (ISS). Often times they need to be removed during a spacewalk, or Extravehicular Activity (EVA), to complete a maintenance task or another EVA objective. These zip ties could be anywhere on the payload, including smaller spaces that are hard to reach. Since this occurs in microgravity, the zip tie needs to be captured once removed to keep it from floating away and potentially causing damage to the ISS or another piece of hardware.

Our mission is to design and manufacture a novel zip-tie cutting and retention device for use during an EVA. We dub our design: The Lion Cutter.

Who We Are

The mission co-leads are Tejit Pabari (SEAS ‘21) and Christopher Fryer (SEAS ‘19). The team members are: Yuanxia Lee (CC ‘18), Garrett Harrison (SEAS ‘21), Megan Noga (SEAS ‘20), Henrique Monteiro (SEAS ‘21), Mitchell Miya (SEAS ‘21), David Alvarez (SEAS ‘21)

Proposal

We spent weeks brainstorming designs and drawing rough schematics of our ideal device design, and submitted our finished proposal to NASA. Here are some preliminary CAD drawings that we included in our proposal:

Accepted!

In December we received the amazing news that our proposal had been accepted!

We will now join 21 other undergraduate teams at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in the spring!

Next Steps

We are modifying our design to include a spring-locking mechanism, which will keep the device closed during zip-tie retention without needing for the astronaut to continually hold onto the device. Here is a preliminary CAD drawing of said modification:

We hope to begin manufacturing soon.

-Chris and the entire Micro-G team