News & Honors

• Vice President Kamala Harris has selected Daniel Hastings to serve on the National Space Council’s Users Advisory Group (UAG). Members "will serve to enable the Biden-Harris Administration’s effort to maintain a robust and responsible U.S. space enterprise and preserve space for current and future generations."

• Mark Drela has been appointed as editor-in-chief of the AIAA Journal of Aircraft — AeroAstro faculty now oversee two of the major industry journals, with Olivier de Weck as the editor-in chief of the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.

• Luca Carlone has been named an Associate Fellow — Class of 2023 in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

• Wesley Harris was awarded the 2023 AIAA Durand Lectureship for Public Service. His lecture, “A Half Century of Research in Fluid Dynamics,” will be given on Jan. 25 during the 2023 AIAA SciTech Forum in National Harbor, Md.

• Carmen Guerra-Garcia co-authored the Aerospace America 2022 Year in Review for the plasmadynamics and lasers section. The Year in Review is AIAA’s annual roundup of the year's biggest aerospace achievements and milestones, described by AIAA's technical and integration and outreach committees.

• Graduate student Vaishnavi Ramaswamy, and visiting student Claire M. Namuroy (Imperial College London) from the Hypersonics Research Laboratory (HRL), presented their research "Ultraspherical Spectral Method for Incompressible Boundary Layer Stability" at the 75th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics in Indianapolis, Ind.

• Harsh G. Bhundiya, Fabien Royer and Zachary Cordero's paper, "Compressive Behavior of Isogrid Columns Fabricated with Bend-Forming" was selected for Best Paper during the AIAA SciTech 2022 conference held last year, Jan. 3-7, in San Diego, Calif.

• The WORMS and Lunar Tower teams' papers were accepted for IEEE Aerospace Conference 2023 in Big Sky, Mont.

• Nancy Leveson and John Thomas gave a 5-day class to International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on aviation accident/incident analysis, hazard analysis, and safety management systems.

• John Thomas gave the keynote talk at the Japanese STAMP Workshop, organized and run by the Japanese government.

• Julia Briden was accepted into the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Statistics (IDPS).

• Hamsa Balakrishnan, Richard Binzel, Kerri Cahoy, Luca Carlone, Edward Crawley, David Darmofal, Olivier de Weck, Mark Drela, Edward Greitzer, John Hansman, Daniel Hastings, Jonathan How, Sertac Karaman, Nancy Leveson, Ricard Linares, Paulo Lozano, Youssef Marzouk, Eytan Modiano, Jaime Peraire, Nicholas Roy, Sara Seager, Julie Shah, Zoltán Spakovszky, Ian Waitz, Qiqi Wang, Brian Wardle, Brian Williams and Moe Z. Win were all listed among the most-cited authors across all scientific fields in 2021 by the article “A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field” (2022 update) published by Elsevier.

Research

Nov. 14-17, 12 members of a team sponsored by the Space Resources Workshop attended the NASA 2022 BIG Idea Challenge finals in Pasadena, Calif. to present their prototype for a modular, field-reconfigurable lunar exploration robotic system known as the Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System (WORMS).

The WORMS architecture was designed for rapid repairability and reconfigurability in the field, enabling future crews to carry out many different types of lunar exploration and development missions using a robotics kit consisting of only a few standardized parts.

The SRW team included graduate and undergraduate students, among them several UROPs. A jury of NASA and industry judges awarded the Best Technical Paper award to WORMS; this is the 12th NASA award earned by an MIT SRW team in five years. The team is grateful to all funding sponsors and to our industry mentors: NASA, MIT AeroAstro, Massachusetts Space Grant, Boston Dynamics, MassRobotics and Robots5.

WORMS, along with other finalists, were recently featured in a National Geographic article, "'Snakes' on the moon? These helpers could soon join our lunar mission."

Suhas Eswarappa Prameela and Zachary Cordero, along with researchers Tresa Pollock (UC Santa Barbara), Dierk Raabe (Max Planck), Marc Meyers (UC San Diego), Assel Aitkaliyeva (University of Florida), Kerri-Lee Chintersingh (New Jersey Institute of Technology) and Lori Graham-Brady (Johns Hopkins University) published a technical viewpoint in Nature Reviews Materials called “Materials for Extreme Environments."

Materials for extreme environments can help to protect people, structures and the planet. Extreme temperatures in aeroplane engines, hypervelocity micrometeoroid impacts on satellites, high-speed machining of ceramics and strong radiation doses in nuclear reactors are just some examples of extreme conditions that materials need to withstand. In this viewpoint, experts working on materials for different types of extreme environments discuss the most exciting advances, opportunities and bottlenecks in their fields. 

Prameela penned a section on “Materials for extreme shock and strain-rate environments," and Cordero wrote a section on “Materials for extreme aerospace and space environments,” which summarized key challenges and research opportunities in next-generation reusable liquid propellant rocket engines. 

Björn Lütjens presented a paper, "ForestBench: Equitable Benchmarks for Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification of Nature-Based Solutions with Machine Learning," at the NeurIPS conference earlier this month in New Orleans, La.

The paper was co-authored by Björn Lütjens and Dava Newman, along with Lucas Czech (Carnegie Institution for Science) and David Dao (ETH Zurich).

Anwar Koshakji, Grégoire Chomette, Bianca Giovanardi and Raúl Radovitzky from the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies recently had a paper, "A robust computational framework for simulating the dynamics of large assemblies of highly-flexible fibers immersed in viscous flow," published in the Journal of Computational Physics. The research provides new insights on the dynamics of highly-flexible filaments immersed in viscous fluid.