Keanu Brayman

Undergraduate Researcher @NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Orlando, FL, US

I am working as an undergraduate research student under Dr. Adrienne Dove at The Stephen W. Hawking Center for Microgravity Research and Education.Multiple companies are developing both manned and unmanned rovers for the lunar surface. These vehicles will require wheels designed to operate in lunar regolith, which has many harsh physical and chemical properties such as its jagged particles and electrostatic charge. I am studying ways to measure wheel performance in a vacuum chamber using regolith simulants.Previous work done by another student resulted in a nonfunctional prototype, a cylindrical pan containing a wheel fixed to a rotating arm. I modified this prototype with a more robust rotation mechanism, eliminating sources of error such as inconsistent alignment and vibrations. In addition, I designed a rotation encoder and added a load cell to quantify wheel behavior. Although this work is ongoing, I have already conducted successful tests with low-fidelity simulants and demonstrated the ability to measure wheel rotation.My current work involves analyzing data from the Strata series of flight experiments, which were carried out to investigate particle interactions in microgravity to support the study of planetary formation.