ABEX provides students, faculty, and the general public with spacecraft education and analysis resources for the good of both the program and the world. These resources improve with each semester and are updated each January, May, September, and December. There are eight resource categories: Onboarding Packages, ABEX-Specific Resources, Plans, Reports, Review Data Packages, Templates, Domain Knowledge Maps, and the Spacecraft Seminar Series (S3). Some subsystems handle Export Administration Regulation (EAR) material; that material has been scrubbed from all public documents. Students needing EAR material will receive it after completing the appropriate training.
If you're new to the program and have recently been placed on a subsystem team, the first thing you should do is download your Onboarding Package. Each Onboarding Package contains a ReadMe, the ABEX Project Summary, an ABEX virtual meeting background, and a folder with templates for presentations, mass, volume, power, and risk. If your team has completed it, the Onboarding Package also contains the subsystem Development & Integration Plan and Qualification Plan. Requirements and a formal spacecraft architecture will be provided after ABEX has completed its System Requirements Review.
ABEX is proud to work with a host of faculty and industry professionals committed to the education of youth both in Alabama and around the world. The Spacecraft Seminar Series (S3) is a set of video lectures presented by ABEX faculty, NASA engineers, industry professionals, and more on a wide variety of topics intended to educate students on their schedule. ABEX is planning additional recorded presentation lectures in Fall 2022.
Onboarding Packages provide a catch-all for everything you'll need to get started, but materials can also be downloaded individually. Here you can find the Project Summary, virtual meeting background, requirements (when they're published), and mission architectures (when they're published).
ABEX has four types of plans that are used where they are needed: Analysis Plans (AP), Development & Integration Plans (DIP), Qualification Plans (QP), and Test Plans (TP). While the development, integration, and qualification material details the order of operations and purpose behind testing, the verification procedure and Entry & Success Criteria for each test are located in test plans. Some teams, such as Astrodynamics and Radiation (part of thermal), have Analysis Plans, whereas other teams have DIPs for hardware-focused subsystems. If a plan is missing from an Onboarding Package, that's likely because it hasn't been created yet.
At the end of each Design Analysis Cycle, which ABEX aligns with semesters, most ABEX teams give a review presentation to Subject Matter Experts. At least three days before the review, a Review Data Package (RDP) is sent to reviewers. The RDP contains the presentation itself in pdf form, relevant Domain Knowledge Maps, and any additional material relevant to the presentation subject matter.
These are pre-made templates for presentations, mass reporting, volume reporting, power reporting, and risk reporting.
Domain Knowledge Maps (DKM) represent the convergence of Model-Based Systems Engineering and education. ABEX students must learn an immense amount of material quickly, and DKMs help facilitate that process for all subsystems. Concepts exist that must be calculated, described, or modeled. Those concepts represent Knowledge Points (KP), or a landing platform for students to understand a concept thoroughly. Each KP in the ABEX program gets a DKM, and an interactive learning tool will be added to the ABEX website in Fall 2022 to help students learn KPs such as Technical Performance Measures through DKMs online rather than looking at a figure in a plan. In the meantime, DKMs are provided per team as they are ready.