Engineer, HI-SEAS project
Ansley Barnard, and engineer from Reno, NV, is the Engineering Officer for Mission V. She is in charge of monitoring their life support systems and fixing things that break down. She is passionate about performance vehicles by land, air and space. Professionally, she enjoys solving multi-disciplinary problems in the aerospace and automotive industries. She has worked with NASA and Boeing on advanced composite structures. She also designed aerodynamic bodywork for cars racing in the 100th Indy 500. Prior to joining HI-SEAS, Ansley worked in engineering optimization at Ford Motor Company seeking to reduce weight, cost and engineering time. Ansley hopes to serve as a US Astronaut in the future. She earned a BS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington.
Speeches
HI-SEAS is a NASA-funded Martian analogue mission seeking to understand how to select and compose a team of astronauts for long duration space missions. Six crew members lived in an isolated habitat on the slopes of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii in a desolate, Mars-like environment. For 8-months they lived as astronauts would on the surface of Mars. Similar to a space mission, resources at the HI-SEAS habitat are limited and dependent on weather, crew-use, and resupply schedules. During Mission V, daily power consumption was tracked and analyzed to develop a crew baseline. Power was supplied to the HI-SEAS habitat from a photovoltaic array and stored in batteries for overnight use. To aid in prioritization of power on cloudy low-power days, the power subsystem was modeled and crew prioritization was determined using systems engineering approaches. A calculator was created for daily generation and consumption prediction, while modeFRONTIER was used to run DOE analyses and set minimum overnight battery limits.