Announcements

The 2024 Lester D. Gardner Lecture is next Thursday, October 10 at 4pm! An honored tradition in AeroAstro since 1959, this year’s Gardner Lecture features four alumni and leaders in their field exploring “Aviation in the Age of John Hansman.” Don’t miss it! 

AeroAstro is hosting two MLK scholars for the 24-25 academic year, Prof. Donna Nelson and Associate Prof. Justin Wilkerson. Each brings unique expertise in mentorship and research.

Applications for the 2025 Brooke Owens Fellowship are open! The organization’s programs are designed to serve both as an inspiration and as a career boost to capable young women and gender minorities who aspire to explore our sky and stars. Contact Brookie alum Nicole McGaa with questions.

The Roundup is a monthly newsletter to keep the AeroAstro community up-to-date on research, community news, and important happenings across the department and MIT.

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In Memoriam

Mathieu Le Provost, a postdoctoral fellow in Youssef Markzouk’s Uncertainty Quantification Group, passed away unexpectedly on July 30 while traveling in France. Read a remembrance honoring his life and contributions on MIT News.

Community Corner

This summer, AeroAstro staff took a day off campus to relax and stretch their creative muscles with an afternoon of painting and a BBQ lunch in Assembly Square.

Prof. Chuchu Fan and family welcomed baby Jingxian Mia Ning in August. Congratulations to their family!

GA^3 welcomed first-year students with kayaking, rock climbing, sailing, and a tasty trip to the three most famous pastry shops in the North End.

necstlab celebrated the end of the summer and welcomed new graduate students with a BBQ on Monday, Sept 2nd. Shout out to BBQ master Shaan Jagani!

Congratulations!

Prof. Hamsa Balakrishnan has been appointed associate dean of the MIT School of Engineering.

Prof. Danielle Wood was selected for Just Tech Fellowship’s third cohort, leading projects that apply satellite Earth Observation technology for environmental management in cooperation with leaders from Africa and Native American Tribes.

Afreen Siddiqi (ESL) and Profs. Daniel Hastings, Richard Linares, and Danielle Wood won funding from NASA to analyze critical economic, social, and policy issues related to Earth’s orbit and cislunar space.

The MIT First Nations Launch Team earned the grand prize in the 2024 NASA First Nations Launch High-Power Rocket Competition, as well as first place in the written portion.

Saba Shaik (SPL) was named a fellow of the Future Space Leaders Grant program for 2024.

Alexander Hillman, William Young, and Prof. Nancy Leveson received an IS Best Paper Award for their paper “Systems-Theoretic Concept Design: An Intent Model for Early Concept Generation.”

Jasmine Aloor won the AeroAstro CommLab video abstract competition. Watch her video here!

Victor Qin and Hamsa Balakrishanan won a Best Paper Award at ICRAT 2024. Their paper, "Modeling Competition Between Service Providers in Advanced Air Mobility (AAM)," studies the future market for air traffic management services for novel aerial vehicles.

Ireland Brown led her team to victory at the Space Station Design Workshop in Munich.

After training for six months, Raphael Dijoud (APG) completed an Ironman challenge! The long-distance triathlon included a 3.8km swim, 180km bike, and a marathon.

Researchers in the Aerospace Plasma Group (APG) won a best paper award at the International Conference on Lightning and Static Electricity (ICOLSE) for their paper, “Wind Tunnel Experiments of Long Arcs in Crossflow. ”The paper explores long arcs in the MIT wind tunnels, exploring the physics of lightning attachment to aircraft.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

National Hispanic Heritage Month is observed from September 15 - October 15, 2024. During this month-long celebration, various events, activities, and educational programs take place nationwide to highlight the achievements and diverse heritage of the Hispanic and Latine communities.

DEI Annual Report

The AY 23 AeroAstro DEI Annual Report is available for all community members to review. The report reflects on the critical progress made toward a more inclusive department. Contact aa-diversity@mit.edu or use the anonymous form to submit your feedback on the report. 

Join the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee

The DEI Committee Co-Chairs, Julie Shah, Kerri Cahoy, and Diversity Officer Denise Phillips, invite you to join or stay on the Committee. To participate, please fill out this Google form by October 11, 2024. A monthly time commitment of at least two hours is requested for the 2024-2025 academic year. For more information, contact Denise Phillips, Kristen Ammons, or Mennatallah Hussein.

Committee meetings are open to all! Fall 2024 meetings are scheduled from 10:00-11:00am in 33-116. Join us on October 22, November 7, and December 17.

Highlights

In an oral history, Quentin Wald ‘41 reflected on a lifetime of aeronautical innovation and the timeless spirit of MIT.

Allan Shtofenmakher was featured in MIT News for his research on keeping the cosmos clean through tracking orbital debris.

Illuminated by the reflections of the city lights on the Charles River, on August 28, the Engineering Systems Lab successfully launched PEARL (Platform for Expanding AUV exploRation to Longer ranges) from the MIT Sailing Pavilion, completing an autonomous mission.

Professor Wesley Harris was profiled in IEEE Spectrum, highlighting his storied research career and his outstanding commitment to mentorship.

AeroAstro hosted the inaugural Space Propulsion & Power Platform (SP^3) program at MIT this August, with 40 students from the United States, Asia, Europe, and Australia coming together to learn about the fundamentals of the space sector.

Carissma McGee (STAR Lab) wrote about her experience working and traveling in Morocco with MISTI Arab World, highlighting the ways women support each other in the country’s tech industry.

A group of students and alums gathered at the 11th International Conference on Research in Air Transportation (ICRAT) 2024 in Singapore in July.

Exchange students Nathanael Jenkins and Timur Uyumaz experienced AeroAstro, MIT, and the beauty of New England through MISTI’s Imperial College London exchange program.

Lanie McKinney (APG) spent the summer at NASA's Kennedy Space Center working with the Applied Chemistry Lab on plasma-based technology to support human space exploration. She conducted plasma-based CO2 conversion experiments for her PhD and collaborated on projects under NASA's Space Act Agreement.

Prof. Danielle Wood and Team Space Enabled hosted the 2024 NASA Water Resources Program Team meeting at the MIT Media Lab. The program area is part of the Earth Action activity within NASA's Earth Science Division to support environmental management.

CommLab

The AeroAstro Comm Lab provides 1-1 peer coaching sessions for all forms of technical communication. Make an appointment today to improve the effectiveness of your next paper, poster, presentation and more!

This summer we have been hard at work creating new digital resources to help you to improve your technical communication skills including:

• Formulating a Research Topic
• Thoughtful Engagement with Disability Through Inclusive Design Principles
• The Memo Memo
• Getting Started on Your Paper: The Skills Nobody Taught You

Upcoming Workshops:

10/8: Formulating a Research Statement

10/21: Masters Thesis Kick-off and Lunch (for 2nd-year Masters Students)

11/4: Physicality of Presentations

Research

AERA

Multi-level action tree rollout (MLAT-R): Efficient and accurate online multiagent policy improvement | Andrea Henshall and Prof. Sertac Karaman present the Multi-Level Action Tree Rollout (MLAT-R) algorithm, providing improvements to one-agent-at-a-time algorithms that give accurate state value estimates but are often too complex for online use.

APG

Tutorial: Electrical measurements in nanosecond pulsed plasma reactors | Researchers provide a background on the mathematics of transmission line theory, a tutorial on how to take electrical measurements for NPDs, and a publicly available numerical tool that predicts voltage and current reflections in coaxial cables.

ARCLab

Impacts of space weather forecasting uncertainty on satellite conjunction assessment | Members of ARCLab and colleagues investigate the impacts of space weather driver forecasting uncertainty on satellite drag and collision avoidance maneuver decision-making.

A method for assessing satellite operators’ compliance with geosynchronous orbital assignments | Thomas G. Roberts and Prof. Richard Linares from the Aerospace Robotics and Controls Lab (ARCLab) introduce a novel method for assessing compliance to the ITU’s orbital assignments in GEO.

CTG

Building-block-flow computational model for large-eddy simulation of external aerodynamic applications | This research integrates computational fluid dynamics simulations with artificial neural networks to enhance the accuracy of predicting airflow around aircraft and other aerospace-related vehicles.

Building-block-flow model for large-eddy simulation: GPU implementation and application to the CRM-HL | The Aerospace Computational Design Lab and Computation Turbulence Group present a GPU-based version of the Building-block Flow model (BFM) for wall-modeled large-eddy simulation (WMLES).

CSAIL

AI assistant monitors teamwork to promote effective collaboration | An AI team coordinator aligns agents’ beliefs about how to achieve a task and intervenes when necessary.

DINaMo

Long-horizon planning for multi-agent robots in partially observable environments | Introducing LLaMAR, a cognitive architecture that employs a plan-act-correct-verify framework, achieving state-of-the-art results in long-horizon tasks within partially observable environments.

ESL

Quantitative modeling of water demand to support a continuous human presence on Mars | Members of the Engineering Systems Lab (ESL) have updated a simulation tool called HabNet to improve water demand estimates to sustain a human presence on Mars.

HRL

Ultraspherical polynomial spectral method for boundary layer stability problems | This paper outlines this new spectral coefficient method, which applies to the stability problems associated with low speed boundary layers. The paper received Third Place in the 2024 AIAA CFD Student Paper Competition.

REALM

Diverse controllable diffusion policy with signal temporal logic | Researchers in REALM are enhancing simulations for self-driving cars by studying and developing more realistic and varied behaviors that also follow traffic rules.

Learning-based bayesian inference for testing of autonomous systems | REALM researchers propose learning-based models for fast and efficient discovery of failures in autonomous systems prior to deployment, validated by demonstrations on two robotic system platforms.

Space Enabled

Study evaluates impacts of summer heat in U.S. prison environments | “In terms of environmental hazards, extreme heat causes some of the most acute impacts for incarcerated people,” says Ufuoma Ovienmhada. She and other researchers identify facility-level factors that could worsen heat impacts for incarcerated people.

The political and legal landscape of space debris mitigation in emerging space nations | This study highlights the growing concern of space debris and the need for all nations, emerging and established space nations alike, to adopt sustainable practices for the long-term use of outer space.

SPARK Lab

Khronos: 4D Spatio-temporal Perception for Autonomous Robots | Researchers from MIT SPARKlab have created novel perception algorithms that for the first time allow robots to build a 4D spatio-temporal representation of their environment.

In the Media

NASA needs Boeing's Starliner, so development most likely will continue | UPI | "I don't think this is a showstopper for future missions," says Prof. Olivier de Weck in an interview about the implications of the technical issues on Boeing’s Starliner.

What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 | MIT Technology Review | Paulo Lozano says anomalies are to be expected in rocket engines. “These engines produce more power than small cities, and they work in stressful conditions,” says Lozano. “It’s very hard to contain them.” 

Launching a Legacy | MIT Better World | Friends and colleagues of Paul David Tompkins ’92 (1970–2022) remember him as a person who never did anything halfway. Space, though, was a lifelong passion.

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