Henna Jethani

Lead Electrical and Software Engineer for Mars Oasis: CU Boulder's team for the NASA Sponsored eXploration Habitat (X-Hab) competition. In the span of nine months, I led the design and development of the electrical and software components necessary to implement autonomous plant growth and maintenance in a reduced-scale Martian greenhouse prototype.

Developed an artificial gravity test vehicle with three other team members. In this proof-of-concept design, we practiced the principles of counter-rotating masses and angular momentum to induce g's on the vehicle's habitat. I worked on all aspects of the vehicle from preliminary dynamics analysis, to mechanical construction and electrical integration. With my team, I conducted data collection on a microgravity parabolic maneuver flight via Zero G Corp.

I built a controllable lab containment to illustrate the visual illusion of levitating water droplets by directing strobing LEDs at oscillating streams of water. The control paradigm was made of a pair of range finders that I connected to an audio circuit to also act as an instrument. I worked individually on the planning, designing, building, coding and wiring of this project.

For our senior year thesis, my project partner and I designed and fabricated samples of a multifunctional supercapacitor. We investigated whether energy could be stored on the Carbon Nanotubes(CNTs) incorpororated into a layup. I worked on the design, CNT growth in the lab, composite layups, supercapacitor assembly, and testing.

Wrote support vector machine code for the JPL BioSleeve - a sleeve of EMG electrodes used as a control paradigm for prosthetic and hands-free robotic control. Applied feature engineering to determine which features would lead to high classifier accuracy. Collaborated with two other engineering students and two JPL Engineers. Coded in MATLAB's libsvm and Java. Worked on improving classification algorithms and sleeve design.

I conducted an analysis of electric versus chemical propulsion for my graduate Spaceflight Dynamics class. I documented my analysis of electric propulsion and chemical rockets on a website that can be reached by clicking the above heading. Integrators and optimization code using Edelbaum and Hohmann equations were written in MATLAB. The website includes my MATLAB scripts that were used to do the orbital dynamics analysis.