Overview

The UTAT Space Systems Demo Day is an open-house event in which prospective members have an opportunity to visit us in the Lab Space. It is a recruitment event that runs once at the start each semester (summer, fall, winter). The purpose of the event is to attract interest in the team, show off our work, and sign on new members. This page details the materials and workflows required to run the event from ground-zero.

Structure

The event is structured into the following sections:

These are explained in greater depth below.

Mission Overview Seminar

This behaves as a sort of an “extended kickoff”, following the UTAT-Wide Kickoff. Attendees get a presentation-style session which covers a high level introduction to the current mission, the spacecraft, and the team structure. Primary goal**:** BREADTH, not depth — give members a surface taste of what each major team is doing. The goal is to get members excited about the mission and the team.

Every lead should have a chance to present their team on their behalf. This is a great way to showcase the diversity of the team in terms leadership styles, design work, etc. It is a fast way for members to get to know the leads team. General members may optionally speak, but the 1 hour time constraint should be observed to minimize loss in engagement.

2-5 minutes to talk about “here's who we are”, “this is what we do”, and example of previous work, and “this is what we're working towards” would be a good summary to separate the teams without overwhelming people. We can go into more detail at each of the stations and in the Q&A.

The presentation consists of:

1. A short history of the team.
2. Our attitude/philosophy towards members.
3. What it means to be on a design team, balancing learning and a deliverable-centric approach.
4. The scientific mission, and what deliverables we want out of the mission.
5. An understanding of the physical structure of the spacecraft and its components.
6. The existence and purpose of each subsystem on the team.
7. An understanding of how the spacecraft is operated from launch to decommissioning.
8. What engineering timelines look like (NASA development phases), and where we are right now.