Technical Tools and Ancillary Support:

CE mechanical engineers work closely with the members of other SAO engineering groups--Structural Analysis and Design, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Product Assurance, and Design/Drafting--to form high functioning, multi-disciplinary teams. These teams pride themselves on working closely with science staff to understand their requirements, and to design and build instruments that frequently exceed their original technical goals. Mechanical engineers utilize a number of sophisticated hardware and software tools for design and fabrication support including:

• Universal capability in several 3-D solid modeling packages in particular, more than 15 years' experience with Unigraphics IDEAS, which provides an integrated platform to design, analyze, and detail all hardware prior to fabrication
• Seamless CAM interface to the fabrication capabilities of the SAO Central Engineering Machine Shop
• Access to unique, high precision structural modeling
• Fluency in a range of engineering computational software packages such as Matlab and Mathcad
• Instrument prototyping

Mechanical engineers are closely involved with the fabrication of all hardware. To create a full service engineering organization, they work closely with the SAO CE Machine Shop, which is currently co-located with the engineering development laboratories at Cambridge Discovery Park. In addition, when outsourcing is required because of the size or unique attributes of a part; engineers can call upon a large network of highly qualified commercial machine shops and related industries with whom they have developed strong working relationships over the course of many years of successful projects.