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3D Printing of Satellites
 The University of Texas at El Paso’s W. M. Keck Center for 3D Innovation is a premier lab focusing on Additive Manufacturing – a technology that was invented almost 25 years ago in order to fabricate three-dimensional prototypes, but more recently is evolving to be used in manufacturing highly-customized 3D finished products. If you haven’t heard of the term Additive Manufacturing before, a more intuitive description is 3D printing and an analogy can be made between printing a 2D picture from your home computer. As a common printer today will print a 2D image on paper, Additive Manufacturing allows one to print a CAD model of a 3D object (say a coffee mug for instance) layer by layer in a 3D printer and have the mug custom-fit for you specifically with the imprint of their fingers in the handle. You could then print a customized coffee mug for each member of your family with the same printer.
The Keck Center can fabricate 3D objects that are plastic, metal, of bio-compatible materials or that contain electronics. A recent focus for the center is on structural electronics in which electronics can be fabricated in a 3D structures of arbitrary and complex shape in order to accommodate human anatomy - possibly for wearable computing or custom-fit intelligent prosthetics. Or simply to replace structural components in satellites, planes, cars or furniture with equivalent structures that contain intelligence with embedded electronics. The applications of this technology are only limited by one’s imagination and one day you will eventually be able to download a file and - in your house – print your next 4G cell phone.
A recent collaboration between the University of New Mexico’s COSMIAC and UTEP’s Keck Center is resulting in an electronics structure being launched in a CubeSat Satellite in August.
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