Nikita Shetti | Payload System Engineer | Airbus Defence and Space

 

Nikita is a 24 year old award-winning Satellite Payload System Engineer and has been working in the space industry for almost 2 years. She is experienced with simultaneously working on multiple satellite projects in Test Software development, Radio Frequency, Electrical Systems, engineering bids, corporate volunteering, STEM and University Outreach and is working towards getting Chartership status with the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS). Besides being a space enthusiast, she is passionate about processor systems, sustainability, technical and creative writing including co-authoring research papers in progress.

Before her current role she interned at a space-start-up based space in Switzerland developing an efficient small satellite delivery vehicle capable of bringing payloads to multiple orbits. Her role involved implementing a propulsion thruster system platform for attitude control and designing algorithms on MATLAB/Simulink for a 3 degree of freedom model using classical control methods such as PID, PWPF, gain scheduling, bending & sloshing modes in preparation for auto-coding using C++.

During her Master’s, she assisted PhD students working on a Bioscience, Astrobiology, Medicine, Materials on CubeSat on (Stratospheric) Balloon Experiments for University Students platform sending nematode worm payload sharing 90% Human DNA from ESRANGE Space Centre for Low Earth Orbit research. She worked as a CubeSat Electronic Engineer to support the building, assembly and testing of PCB, surface mount components for LEDs developed for the CubeSat camera via soldering and worked on breadboards with Raspberry Pi 4 and comprehended PCB schematics on KiCad. She also worked as a Marketing and Outreach Executive where she took LinkedIn reach to 1000 followers & graphic designed posters for project promotions. The project was later produced into a paper titled “A Modular Hardware & Software Architecture for a Student-Designed BioCubeSat Prototype using Autonomous Operations” at 35th Annual Small Satellite Conference 2021.

Nikita was also one of the key engineers for her MSc group design project for devising a sustainable business plan to upgrade a futuristic concept of building a massive satellite capable of producing communications from the Geostationary Orbit to earth for rural areas with poor mobile infrastructural services and proposing an autonomous satellite self-servicing system using recycled space debris. The project was presented as a paper at the Space, Satellites, Sustainability Conference 2021.

She also gained civil engineering work experience one of UK’s largest infrastructural and strategic rail project, where she trained with engineers to study site management, surveying, health/safety regulations to further learn about different branches of engineering outside her academic sphere.