Announcements

• Wesley Harris as been named the 2022 recipient of UVA Engineering’s Robert A. Bland Award.

• Wesley Harris was selected as the 2023 AIAA Durand Lecturer. The award is "presented for notable achievements by a scientific or technical leader whose contributions have led directly to the understanding and application of the science and technology of aeronautics and astronautics for the betterment of humankind."

• MLK Visiting Professor Moriba Jah was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for his work in space environmentalism.

• Danielle Wood was inducted into the International Astronautical Association as a full member at the IAC in Paris.

• PhD student Julia Briden was awarded the Luigi G. Napolitano Award in recognition of her significant contribution to the advancement of the aerospace sciences.

• Akila Saravanan '23 is the 2022-2023 recipient of the annual Astronaut Scholarship, which recognizes outstanding students in engineering, science, or math.

• PhD student Matthew Corrado was awarded Lincoln Lab's Carl E Nielsen Jr. Family Fund Award, given to graduate students who excel in electrical engineering and computer science. 

• Space Enabled PhD candidate Jack Reid was named a Future Space Leader. The Future Space Leaders Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the career development of young space and satellite industry professionals. The grant enables recipients to attend the annual IAC.

• Danielle Wood presented at the UN/Austria Symposium 2022, which concentrated on the topic of "space for climate action: experiences and best practices in mitigating and adapting to climate change and supporting sustainability on Earth." The symposium was focused on showcasing the most recent initiatives, experiences and best practices in mitigating and adapting to climate change and supporting sustainability on Earth.

• Danielle Wood spoke at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs' 29th Workshop on Space Technology for Socio-Economic Benefits, which concentrated this year on "Access to Space for All: Bridging the Space Divide."  

• HSL PhD student Michelle Lin was awarded the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity Grant for their proposal “Architectural Design Framework for Providing Passive Behavioral Health Countermeasures." 

• PhD student Cory Frontin's article, "Output error behavior for discretizations of ergodic, chaotic systems of ordinary differential equations," was selected as the featured article in the Physics of Fluids. 

• Graduate student Adriana Mitchell and Professors Richard Linares and Jonathan How were awarded the NASA JPL Strategic University Research Partnership Proposal Award for the work titled “Robust Machine Learning for Autonomous Visual Navigation Under Variable Illumination Conditions.”

• Nancy Leveson was featured in a U.S. Navy documentary on the safety of naval surface ships, and taught a half-day professional education class to UL and a 3 day class to the Transport Safety Board of Argentina.

• John Thomas, director of the ESL, delivered the keynote address at the STAMP Europe Conference in Warsaw, Poland.

• John Thomas was invited to lecture on safety-critical digital engineering for the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, on human factors engineering for safety at Hyundai and Kia in South Korea, and to BWXT on control system engineering for safety-critical applications.

• PhD student Michael Schmid was invited to be a panelist on "Operational Cognitive Electronic Warfare" at the Association of Old Crows International Workshop in D.C. Oct. 25 - 27, and an invited speaker on the safety of AI at an automotive standards conference in Detroit. 

Delta and MIT AeroAstro announced a collaboration earlier this month that will seek to discover new ways to eliminate persistent contrails using an algorithm that predicts altitudes and locations where contrails are likely to form.

Carmen Guerra-Garcia and graduate students Lee Strobel and Benjamin Martell were recently published by the Journal of Applied Physics. Their paper, "Electric field measurements of DC-driven positive streamer coronas using the E-FISH method," reports on direct measurement of the electric fields within the discharge using the E-FISH method.

The research is a collaboration with the Princeton Collaborative Research Facility (Arthur Dogariu and Anatoli Morozov).

Daniel Hastings and PhD student Michael Luu's paper, "On-Orbit Servicing System Architectures for Proliferated Low-Earth-Orbit Constellations" has been published in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.

Carmen Guerra-Garcia's article, "The Role of Low Temperature Plasma Research in Designing the Lightning and Precipitation Static Protection of Novel Aircraft," was just published by the IEEE and will appear in a Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science: Plenary, Invited & Selected Minicourse Papers from ICOPS 2022.

The article is based on a plenary talk Guerra-Garcia gave at ICOPS 2022, and focuses on building bridges between the practical discipline of Lightning Protection of aircraft, and the Low Temperature Plasma research field.

Photograph of the F-106B aircraft used during the Storm Hazards program led by NASA in the 1980s. This vehicle was struck by lightning over 700 times. Courtesy of NASA.

IAC 2022

There was strong representation from AeroAstro at the International Astronautical Conference (IAC), hosted in Paris from Sept. 18 - 22. Students presented their research in different live sessions, panels, presentations, and interactive posters.

Space Enabled

Space Enabled had a strong showing at the IAC, and presented 11 papers. Danielle Wood was inducted as a full member into the International Astronautical Academy, and moderated the plenary session "A14Space: Perspective from the Next Generation." 

Presentations by Space Enabled: 

Kristi Acuff: "Towards Antiracist and Anticolonial Attitudes and Norms in Technology Industries: A Comparative Analysis of Policies in the Aerospace and Nuclear Industries and their Impacts on Innovation"

Scott Dorrington: "Development of Identifiability Scores for the Detectability, Identifiability, and Trackability Analysis of the Space Sustainability Rating"

Seamus Lombardo: "Utilizing Satellite Earth Observation Analyses and the Environment-Vulnerability-Decision-Technology Modeling Framework to Support the Yurok Tribe in Mitigating Climate Change Impacts through Natural Resource Management"

Ufuoma Ovienmhada: "Earth Observation Data Applied to Measure Environmental Injustice in United States Prison Landscapes"

Gladys Ngetich: "Centrifugal Casting of Paraffin Wax: Numerical Analysis of the Influence of Casting Tube Aspect Ratio"

Celina Pasiecznik: “A Dynamical Systems Analysis of the Effects of Launch Rate Distribution on the Stability of a Source-Sink Orbital Debris Model”

Minoo Rathnasabapathy: "Role of Emerging Nations in Ensuring Long-term Space Sustainability"

Jack Reid: "The Environment-Vulnerability-Decision-Technology Framework: A Process for Developing Multi-Disciplinary Decision Support Systems for Sustainable Development Applications"

Javier Stober: "Experimental Development of a Passive Regolith Sampler for Lunar Missions"

"Experimental Study of Wax Fuel Formation During Spaceflight"

Frank Tavares: "Developing an Anti-Colonial Practice: Moving from Conversation to Structural and Institutional Change within the Space Community"

Other presentations with Space Enabled involvement:

"Promoting Sustainable Value in Earth's Orbit"

"The Space Sustainability Rating: an operational process incentivizing operators to implement sustainable design and operation practices"

ARCLab

Seven graduate students from the ARCLab presented their research at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris, France: Julia Briden, Allegra Farrar, Daniel Miller, Will Parker, Celina Pasiecznik, Julia Pasiecznik, and Thomas G. Roberts. Their work was featured in the Astrodynamics, Space Propulsion, and Space Debris Symposia. Respective papers by Allegra Farrar and Julia Briden were accepted by NASA to participate with the International Student Education Board (ISEB) as part of the conference. Julia Briden was awarded the Luigi G. Napolitano Award in recognition of her significant contribution to the advancement of the aerospace sciences.

Julia Briden: “Risk Guarantees for Integrated Targeting and Guidance during Powered Descent and Landing”

Allegra Farrar: “An iterative LQR Method for Addressing Model Uncertainty in the Planetary Entry Problem”

William Parker: “Non-Parametric Modeling for State Estimation Filtering and Control of Aggregate Spacecraft Systems”

Celina Pasiecznik: “A Dynamical Systems Analysis of the Effects of Launch Rate Distribution on the Stability of a Source-Sink Orbital Debris Model”

Daniel Miller: “High-Inclination Solar Orbiter enabled by Sail-Augmented Electric Propulsion”

Julia Pasiecznik: “A Lambert's Problem Solution via the Koopman Operator with Orthogonal Polynomials”

Thomas G. Roberts: “A Survey of Longitudinal-Shift Maneuvers Performed by Geosynchronous (GEO) Satellites from 2010 to 2021”

ESL

12 students from the ESL attended the IAC this year, and presented research on topics like satellite constellation management, satellite design, on orbit servicing (OOS), national space strategy development, refueling experiments, and life support systems.

Guillem Casadesus Vila: "Dynamic Frequency Assignment for Mobile Users in Multibeam Satellite Constellations"

Manwei Chan: "Agrifuge: an exploration of controlled irrigation methods for a rotating plant habitat"

Daniel Erkel: "Ouroboros - A Case Study in Distributed Agile Concurrent Engineering (DACE) of Space Missions"

"Tech Policy Insights: a System Dynamics Model-based Assessment of the growing NewSpace Ecosystem"

"Space Strategies for Emerging Actors - \\ a Portfolio-based Approach"

Skylar Eiskowitz: "Towards Autonomous Satellite Communications: An AI-based Framework to Address System-level Challenges"

Chloe Gentgen (co-author): "The Ceres Human Exploration and Transit Architecture (CHEATA): a mission architecture for small bodies exploration"

Ryann Hee: "Neurovestibular response to Virtual Reality sensory presentation in mixed-gravitational conditions"

Asha Jain: "A Model of Space Debris Metal Injection into the Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere"

Juan José Garau Luis: "Towards Autonomous Satellite Communications: An AI-based Framework to Address System-level Challenges"

Michael Luu: "Spinner - Centrifugal Fluid Transfer in Microgravity"

Johannes Norheim: "Spacecraft Preliminary Sizing Formulation Methods"

Celina Pasiecznik: "A Dynamical Systems Analysis of the Effects of Launch Rate Distribution on the Stability of a Source-Sink Orbital Debris Model"

Elwyn Sirieys: "Societal response to negative environmental externalities: the case of space activities"

HSL

Jeffrey Hoffman: "18 Months of MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment) Operations on the Surface of Mars - Preparing for Human Mars Exploration"

Michelle Lin: "Prototyping wearable sensor garment for understanding proprioceptive changes in microgravity"

Björn Lütjens: "Satellite Imagery of the Future: Visualizing Arctic Sea Ice Melt with Physically-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks"

Jessia Todd: "The Ceres Human Exploration and Transit Architecture (CHEATA): a mission architecture for small bodies exploration"

STAR Lab

Cadence Payne: "Auxiliary Sensor Package (ASP) Design for Characterizing Auroral Emissions with the AERO and VISTA CubeSats"

Hannah Tomio: "Enabling Lidar Instruments for Small Satellite Earth Observation Missions"

SSL

Evan Kramer: "Rotating Synthetic Aperture Space Telescopes for Earth Observation"