دکتر فرشید عبدی

The student team consisted of Ashley Benedict,  Keena Byrd, Lalaine Ignacio,  Amit Lagu,  Ralph Curtis Palmer, III, April Savoy, Deepti Surabattula,  and Samantha Vaitkunas.  The students participated as part of an Industrial Engineering and Aeronautics and Astronautics course.  The team won NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate systems enginereing paper competition, and received an award of $2,500.  The team was also invited to be VIP attendees at the space shuttle launch scheduled for the week of 21 October.  The team's entry beat out other entries from Georgia Tech, University of Missori-Rolla, University of Michigan, Temple University, the Milwaukee School of Engineering and Utah State University.

Using quality function deployment and a Pugh matrix, the students designed a decision support tool for improving communication amongst NASA ground operations personnel.  The team focused on addressing a significant and relevant NASA problem using a cost effective systems engineering process.  Using this process, the students decided that the implementation of the tool should be on Apple's iPhone.  One of the main challenges for the students was that the iPhone was not available during the project period (February through April), so the students were forced to use a mockup of the device.  The result was a device designed to help with NASA ground operations for launch vehicle inspections and other pre-launch activities.