Announcements

Crossing the pond

Prof. Steven Barrett is stepping down as AeroAstro Department Head at the end of this academic year. He will be returning to the UK and will take up the Regius Professorship of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

Dean Anantha Chandrakasan has reconvened the department head search committee, chaired by Prof. Jaime Peraire, who will make their recommendations to the Dean as soon as possible. If you have feedback to offer about the department head search, please email Prof. Peraire or any member of the committee before Friday, March 29. 

Upcoming events

Have you explored the new Events section yet? All events now have their own event page, as well as a handy “add to calendar” feature; you can also select Public or Department-only!

Book Talk: Former Prosecutor Debbie Hines Discusses "Get Off My Neck"

Thursday, March 28 at 3:30pm: Prof. Dan Hastings joins author Debbie Hines in a conversation about her new book from The MIT Press – Get Off My Neck: Black Lives, White Justice, and a Former Prosecutor's Quest for Reform.

SpaceTech 2024: AI, Machine Learning, and Autonomy in Space

Part of MIT Space Week, the SpaceTech conference is a technically oriented, future-looking event designed to build awareness around the present and future of space technology. This year’s conference features keynote speakers from NASA JPL and MIT CSAIL, and panelists from Planet, Draper, and U.S. Space Force. Register for a virtual ticket to watch the live webcast!

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Town Hall Meeting

Thursday, April 18, 2024, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Location: 45-230

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.

• Submit upcoming events to the Calendar (log-in required).
• Send us news about your research using this form.

Community Corner

This month’s Maker Meeting participants created beautiful custom jigsaw puzzles! Check out the designs by Fabian Moeller, Alexa Torres, Esther Allen, MaryAnn Carey, Peng Mun Siew, Denise Phillips, and Jen-Hung Fang.

Congratulations!

George Lordos was awarded Best Paper in Track 13 at the IEEE Aerospace Conference for “Leveraging economies of scale and gains from specialization for robust crewed Mars architectures.” 

Professor Wesley Harris has been elected to a two-year term as the Working Group Lead for the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics. 

Aneesa Sonawalla (ACL) won second place at the Draper Scholars Research Symposium for her poster “Collaborative Navigation for Multi-Agent Robot Teams.” Catch her research presentation and the poster session on April 8!

HR Bits

Awards and Recognition: 

The School of Engineering's Infinite Mile and Ellen J. Mandigo Awards are still accepting nominations. The awards celebration will be on June 25, 2024 from 11:00 am – 1:00 pm.

The Gordon Y Billard Award and the MIT Staff Award for Distinction in Service are accepting nominations until April 5, 2024.

The 2024 Annual Department Community Awards nomination process is ongoing. The deadline for nominations is April 19, 2024.

Staff Updates: Join us in extending a warm welcome to our two new hires, Echo Aodhan and Douglas Purdy!

Spot Awards: Congratulations to Pam Fradkin, Eunice Nganga, Esther Allen, and Corrine Giordani – and a big thank you for their service to the department. 

Professional development – Workshops for everyone in April:

Career Development: Interview Skills – April 2

Performance Review Process: Be Prepared – April 2

Increase Your Time Management & Productivity – April 4

LBGTQ+ 101: You Are Welcome Here – April 5

Career Development: Assess Your Skills – April 11

Workshops for managers in April:

Direct Report Communications – April 22

Performance Development: Manager’s Role – April 30

Highlights

Life on Mars, together: Madelyn Hoying and Wing Lam (Nicole) Chan spent two weeks with their crew at the Mars Desert Research Station leading Project MADMEN, an analog mission in a simulated Martian environment.

Delegates from France’s École de Guerre debate program visited the AeroAstro department in February to explore programs and learn about the role of aerospace in national security from faculty experts.

MIT News profiled senior Nicole McGaa, whose research in bioastronautics centers around making space travel safer for human bodies and minds.

From MIT Morningside Academy for Design: Allison Porter’s (HSL) research will lay the foundation for integrating automation into guidance for astronauts using clinical medicine tools in spaceflight.

Roger Hou and Harsh G. Bhundiya (AMSL) shared the secrets of soap bubbles as part of the MIT SPARK educational program for middle and high school students.

Members of ARCLab have been traveling abroad to foster international collaborations and research in the field of space exploration and technology. Read about their experiences on the AeroAstro website. 

New MCSC Geospatial Tool Supports Strategic Decision-making for Decarbonizing Trucking Fleets: Developed by Danika MacDonell alongside Florian Allroggen and Micah Borrero ‘24, The MCSC’s Geospatial Decision Support Tool helps trucking industry stakeholders and fleet owners assess where and how best to decarbonize their fleets by transitioning to low-carbon energy carriers.

The WORMS team demonstrated their prototype at the 2024 Amazon MARS conference. The demonstration showcased the field-reconfigurability of their full-scale hexapod prototype.

Ciarra Ortiz (APL, HSL) represented AeroAstro at the National Society of Black Engineers 50th Annual Conference and spoke on the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship panel: So, you want a career in space? How to enter the aerospace sector in undergrad and postgrad.

Andy Eskenazi (LAE) launched his course “How to CAD almost anything” on MIT OpenCourseWare. The nine-session workshop introduces Computer Aided Design using the SolidWorks modeling software.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month

April 24, 2024, is Denim Day, – a campaign in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The campaign began after a ruling by the Italian Supreme Court where a rape conviction was overturned. The following day, the women in the Italian Parliament came to work wearing jeans in solidarity with the victim.

As the longest running sexual violence prevention and education campaign in history, Denim Day asks that you make a social statement with a fashion statement by wearing jeans on this day as a visible means of protest against the misconceptions that surround sexual violence.

Wear denim on April 24th with a purpose to support survivors.  

Be an Active Bystander:

Active Bystanders Information

Research

ACL

A collective AI via lifelong learning and sharing at the edge | The Aerospace Controls Lab proposes that the convergence of scientific and technological advances will lead to the emergence of new types of scalable, resilient and sustainable AI systems

CSAIL

Method rapidly verifies that a robot will avoid collisions | Peter Werner (EECS), Alexandre Amice (EECS), and Prof. Russ Tedrake developed sum-of-squares programming – a safety check technique which can prove with 100 percent accuracy that a robot’s trajectory will remain collision-free.

Researchers help robots navigate efficiently in uncertain environments | Prof. Nicholas Roy, Martina Stadler SM '20, and Yasmin Veys (EECS) have developed an algorithm that can automatically select the best shortcuts for a robot to take that will reduce overall travel time while limiting the likelihood that the robot will meet an impassable obstacle.

EAPS

Life’s building blocks are surprisingly stable in Venus-like conditions | MIT researchers, including Prof. Sara Seager, have found that amino acids — major building blocks for life on Earth — are stable in highly concentrated sulfuric acid. Their results support the idea that these same molecules may be stable in Venus’ highly sulfuric clouds.

ESL

Mach 3.5 compression corner control using microvortex generators | Daniel Gochenaur, Rhys Williams, Kshitij Sabnis, and Holger Babinsky clarify how vortex generators, a type of passive flow control device, can be used to mitigate the negative effects of shock waves interacting with the near-wall flow in high-speed engine inlets.

Interactive Robotics Group

Engineering household robots to have a little common sense | Postdoctoral student Michael Hagenow and Prof. Julie Shah co-authored a study on a method that connects robot motion data with the “common sense knowledge” of large language models, enabling each robot to logically parse many given household task into subtasks so that the robot can move on without having to go back and start a task from scratch.

LAE

Order-of-magnitude improvement in electroaerodynamic thrust density with multistaged ducted thrusters | Nicolas Gomez-Vega and Prof. Steven Barrett demonstrate that enclosing an electroaerodynamic (EAD) device in a duct with an inlet and a nozzle can greatly enhance the propulsive force. 

STAR Lab

CLICK-A: optical communication experiments from a CubeSat downlink terminal | This research presents the results from a satellite laser communications terminal designed to send data to the ground. The terminal is designed to be low-cost and uses a new method for pointing the laser.

Selecting space processors for high order wavefront control adaptive optics systems | Future space telescopes will search for life on planets outside the solar system by actively correcting for deformations in the large telescope mirrors. These deformations change over time, so control algorithms will sense and correct the deformations in real time during scientific observations. STAR Lab investigates computing architectures that can handle the algorithms and will also be reliable in the space radiation environment.

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!

New Fellows

We are excited to welcome the newest AeroAstro Comm Lab Fellows, who will begin coaching later this year!

• Nick Belsten
• Mary Dahl
• Annabel Gomez
• Trevor Long
• Annika Thomas

Upcoming Workshops

Masters Thesis Writing Group: Mondays 3-4pm Rm: 33-116

Resume Drop-in: Thursday, April 4, 11am-1pm Rm 33-218

Workshop: Effective Meetings with Advisors: Thursday April 11, 2-4pm Rm: 33-116

In the Media

The Wall Street Journal | How the World’s Biggest Plane Would Supersize Wind Energy | Mark Lundstrom ‘91 has spent more than seven years with an engineering team at his startup Radia designing the WindRunner, a gargantuan cargo plane. If completed, it will be the largest plane by length and cargo volume. 

MIT Technology Review | How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet | Studies suggest that rerouting flights could be one of the simplest ways of substantially reducing contrail-related warming. “So far, it’s looking very promising that it will be the cheapest, fastest way to reduce the climate impacts of aviation,” says Prof. Steven Barrett.

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