{"id":12041,"date":"2018-11-19T13:21:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T18:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=12041"},"modified":"2018-11-29T08:50:17","modified_gmt":"2018-11-29T13:50:17","slug":"keeping-his-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2018\/11\/keeping-his-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping His Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Parker
(Image: NASA\/Johns Hopkins APL\/Ed Whitman)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Now I know how my mother felt when she dropped me off at college,\u201d says J. Felipe Ruiz, referring to the bittersweet experience of watching his \u201cbaby\u201d (in his case, spacecraft) leave the nest.<\/p>\n

In late July 2018, he and his team at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida loaded the heat shield and solar array cooling system they had spent four years designing, building, and testing into the Parker Solar Probe, which then was placed into the spacecraft. \u201cOnce it\u2019s loaded, we\u2019re hands off and won\u2019t see it again,\u201d says Ruiz, a mechanical engineer with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory<\/a>\u2019s Space Exploration Sector.<\/p>\n

Like a nervous father after freshman orientation, Ruiz hopes all the hard work will pay off on the historic, 60-years-in-the-making mission to \u201ctouch\u201d the biggest star in the solar system. The Parker Solar Probe, launched on August 12, 2018, will orbit the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere 24 times to collect groundbreaking data on its corona, solar wind, and the physics of stars. The heat shield and cooling components should allow the probe to orbit within 4 million miles of the sun\u2019s surface without burning up.<\/p>\n

In May, Ruiz will graduate with a master\u2019s degree in space systems engineering<\/a> from Johns Hopkins, through the Whiting School’s Engineering for Professionals program<\/a>. He had originally planned to attend graduate school just after he completed his bachelor\u2019s in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Then, APL called. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to turn down an offer to come build a spacecraft,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Since EP is designed for working professionals, Ruiz can embrace both dreams. \u201cEP\u2019s flexibility allows me to do what I need to do for my job and still take classes,\u201d he explains of his evening and weekend course schedule, with classes taken both in person and online. \u201cWhen I was in Florida, I did my homework and talked to my class group to keep our projects going. My classes tie back to my work, so I get to implement what I am learning the next day at work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of his instructors have been his APL co-workers, including Gordon Maahs, senior mechanical engineer, who co-teaches Systems Engineering for the EP program: \u201cWorking professionals like Felipe bring their own perspective to the class, which helps to give students a sense of how it really works,\u201d says Maahs. \u201cThere\u2019s a practical aspect that you can\u2019t get from theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lesson not lost on recent \u201cempty nester\u201d Ruiz. \u201cBuilding a satellite is very specific work, and there\u2019s no instruction booklet,\u201d he says. \u201cEP has given me all the tools I need to build my solution from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBuilding a satellite is very specific work, and there\u2019s no instruction booklet,\u201d says APL’s J. Felipe Ruiz. \u201cEP has given me all the tools I need to build my solution from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[1158,2063,3531,3915,3920,3925,3930,3935,3940],"class_list":["post-12041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-students","tag-johns-hopkins-university","tag-johns-hopkins-engineering","tag-applied-physics-laboratory","tag-j-felipe-ruiz","tag-cape-canaveral-air-force-station","tag-parker-solar-probe","tag-space-systems-engineering","tag-engineering-for-professionals","tag-gordon-maahs","issue-winter-2019"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKeeping His Cool - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2018\/11\/keeping-his-cool\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Keeping His Cool - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cBuilding a satellite is very specific work, and there\u2019s no instruction booklet,\u201d says APL's J. 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