Announcements

• Wesley Harris has been elected vice president of the National Academy of Engineering, a group representing the world's most accomplished engineers.

• Chelsea N Onyeador, a Ph.D. candidate working in the Hypersonics Research Lab, wrote an article that has been chosen as the featured article for the most recent issue of the Physics of Fluids. Onyeador's paper, "A Robust Computational Approach to Lees-Dorodnitsyn Laminar Hypersonic Boundary Layers with Temperature-Dependent Properties" will be promoted on the journal's homepage and across social media channels.

• Chloé Gentgen (SM '22) has been selected as one of Aviation Week's Twenty 20s. This honor goes to the twenty most promising aerospace students and professionals worldwide who are emerging aerospace leaders. Chloé will continue her education in AeroAstro working on her PhD.

• Graduate student Ufuoma Ovienmhada, with Danielle Wood, won a NASA grant for the project "Applying the EVDT Integrated Modeling Framework for Environmental Justice Applications," which will be funded by NASA's "Earth Science Applications: Equity and Environmental Justice" through NASA's Applied Sciences Program.

• Manwei Chan, Skylar Eiskowitz, Cadence Payne, and Jack Reid were selected as 2022 Future Space Leader Fellows. The Fellowship provides grants to travel to the International Astronautical Congress.

• Nancy Leveson spoke in the Purdue University Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series. Leveson also gave the keynote addresses at the Penn State University Workshop on Safety and Autonomous Vehicles, and at the City University of Hong Kong Tech Forum on Reliability and Safety of Intelligent Systems.

• Carmen Guerra-Garcia delivered a keynote address, "A Gas Discharge Physics Perspective to Lightning Protection of Aircraft", at the International Conference on Lightning and Static Electricity (ICOLSE) 2022 that took place last week in Madrid. Garcia was joined by two students who also traveled to present at the conference. Undergraduate student Claire Johnson presented on experimental investigation of precipitation-static dischargers in wind, and graduate student Sam Austin presented on computational zoning of unconventional aircraft.

• Kevin Wang won the 2022 Anna Valicek medal with his paper "Airline Dynamic Offer Creation using a Markov Chain Choice Model", MIT's first win since 2015. The Anna Valicek medal is the top prize in airline operations research awarded by AGIFORS, for research in areas like airline scheduling, revenue management, airport planning and air traffic control. Since its inception in 2004, MIT students have received a total of six winning silver medals and two runner-up bronze medals.

NASA has chosen to fund a research proposal, "Adaptive Space Governance and Decision-Support using Source-Sink Evolutionary Environmental Models," submitted by Richard Linares, Danielle Wood, and future MLK Visiting Fellow Moriba Jah as part of their efforts to address orbital debris. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Olivier de Weck, Elwyn Sirieyes, Chloé Gentgen, Asha Jain, and Julia Milton

"Space sustainability isn’t just about space debris: On the atmospheric impact of space launches"

Science Policy Review, Volume III, August 2022

Throughout their life cycle, space launch vehicles impact their local and global environments on Earth and in space. Given the space industry’s projected growth, recent literature suggests that the atmospheric consequences of these activities are understudied and insufficiently addressed. Rockets uniquely emit combustion gases and particles into distinct layers of the atmosphere, inducing effects that include perturbations of ozone chemistry and of Earth’s energy balance through radiative forcing. International environmental regulations do not presently address rocket emissions and only scarce, isolated policies exist at the national level. Additional research on the impact of space launches, including new in situ measurements coupled with global atmospheric models, is required to inform policymaking and future mitigation. The development of an actionable and collaborative sustainability index for launch vehicles could serve as a basis for future regulations or incentivize the sector towards more sustainable designs by making emissions reduction a competitive advantage.

Carmen Guerra-Garcia co-authored an article, "Plasmas for in situ resource utilization on Mars: Fuels, life support, and agriculture," that is published in the Journal of Applied Physics. The research presents a way to address the important space exploration concept of in situ resource utilization (ISRU) on Mars—how to harness and process local resources to generate products. A story on the research also appears in Science Magazine. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Ben Martell, Lee Strobel, and Carmen Guerra-Garcia

"DC-driven positive streamer coronas in airflow"

Plasma Sources Science and Technology, Volume 31 Number 8, August 2022

Streamers in wind are of relevance in atmospheric electricity studies (e.g., electrostatic discharge from wind turbine blades) and can also have implications for plasma reactors. 

Olivier de Weck officially launched his new textbook, Technology Roadmapping and Development, on September 16th. De Weck presents a new framework for managing complex portfolios of technologies using quantitative models and figures of merit.

Adrián Lozano-Durán was invited to give a seminar on Machine Learning for Turbulence and Modeling at the CTR Summer Program. 

Abstract:

In this tutorial, we offer an overview of different machine learning (ML) methodologies for turbulence modeling. The main focus is on RANS and LES but other reduced-order models are also discussed. First, the distinction between models and methods is highlighted. The different ML approaches are introduced according to three classifications: i) the level of modeling form of closure terms, ii) machine learning methodology and, iii) the neural network architecture. A selected number of works are used to illustrate the ML approaches. Finally, we address the question: What can we do with machine-learning models for turbulence that we couldn’t do before?

Watch a video of his talk here

Two MIT-led satellite missions, BeaverCube and CLICK-A, were recently launched from the ISS!

BeaverCube uses multiple cameras in a 3U CubeSat to take color images of Earth’s oceans and detect the temperature of cloud tops and the ocean surface. Collected data can improve understanding of the concentration of phytoplankton, a significant factor in the generation of atmospheric oxygen and for Earth’s climate and weather systems. The investigation also demonstrates a new electric propulsion technology, Tiled Ionic Liquid Electrospray (TILE) 2 by Accion Systems Inc., to maneuver the satellite.

CLICK-A is the first of 2 missions designed to demonstrate communications capability between small spacecraft and their ability to gauge their distance and location. CLICK-A is a risk reduction mission that will test out elements of the optical (laser) communications with a single 3-unit (3U) spacecraft.

New work on additively manufactured (AM) self-sensing porous nanocomposite lattices, led by Brian Wardle’s collaborator Prof. Kumar Shanmugam (Univ. of Glasgow, UK), was featured on the cover of the journal Advanced Engineering Materials. Read the paper.

Dava Newman co-authored a paper, "Technology Readiness Levels for Machine Learning," that will be published in Nature Communications. The paper details a new technology readiness level framework for AI and Machine Learning that was created using Newman's Innovation framework, originally developed for NASA, as a foundation. 

Welcome back, students!

During the new graduate student orientation, Diversity Officer Denise Phillips posed a question to the audience: "what are two words that describe why diversity is important to you?" The audience submitted their responses, reflected in a word cloud above, via an online poll. Some of the most frequent responses included words like "inclusion, understanding, community, equity, respect, and acceptance."