MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics | February 2024 | |
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Film Screening: The Color of Space
Join Diversity Officer Denise Philips for a screening of this powerful and thought-provoking conversation between seven current and former Black astronauts.
The 50-minute screening and discussion will be held on Thursday, February 29, 2024, 11:30-12:45pm in 33-218. Please RSVP here.
Celestial City/Gazing Upwards
Evan L. Kramer (Space Systems Lab) has an exhibition of his urban astrophotography coming up at the MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery, March 1-31. There will be an opening reception at the gallery on Friday, March 1 at 5pm. On March 2 at 2pm, Evan will join NatGeo photographer Babak Tafreshi for a special talk at the MIT Museum.
RAK Week
MIT’s Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) Week is March 11-15. Take an opportunity to intentionally practice kindness all week long.
Communications Toolkit
The comms team has put together a new internal resource for all your communications needs: the Communications Toolkit (login required). The Toolkit is a one-stop shop for instructions, forms, and templates to help with all your communications needs!
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 January, staff took a nostalgia trip with a board game event featuring throwback snacks, vintage board games, and friendly competition. In February, Maker Meetings returned with puppeteering expert Karen Bruce teaching the team the art of making shadow puppets – and beaver puppets stole the spotlight! | |
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Prof. Wesley Harris was recognized by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) for exceptional leadership, career achievement, and significant contributions to the community at the prestigious 2024 NSBE Boston INSPIRE STEM Gala.
Additionally, Prof. Harris was honored with a room dedication at the National Academy of Engineering's Beckman Center in Irvine, CA, on Thursday, February 8.
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Prof. Carmen Guerra-Garcia received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award is one of NSF’s most prestigious recognitions in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.
Prof. Guerra-Garcia additionally received the Junior Bose Award from the School of Engineering, a recognition given annually to a faculty member whose contributions to education have been characterized by dedication, care, and creativity.
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Ryann Hee, Ruth Davis, and Jacob Rodriguez were selected for the 2024 Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship Program. The program awards exceptional college juniors, seniors, and graduate students pursuing aerospace careers with paid internships at cutting-edge commercial space companies.
Jacob Rodriguez ‘25 and MechE’s Benjamin Carlson ‘25 have earned spots in the inaugural MassRobotics Accelerator Program, receiving $100,000 in funding for their startup Oligo.
Alvin Harvey (HSL) received the 2024 MLK Leadership Award for Graduate Students. His unwavering commitment to MIT’s Native American Indigenous community has played an integral role in advancing Institutional efforts toward a more inclusive community.
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Julia Briden (ARCLab) won Best Graduate Student Paper in Guidance and Navigation Control at the 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum for her paper “Improving Computational Efficiency for Powered Descent Guidance via Transformer-based Tight Constraint Prediction.”
Charles Dawson (REALM) presented his talk "What can we learn from a single failure: robust anomaly diagnosis with calibrated normalizing flows" at the 2024 LIDS Student Conference and received the Best Student Talk award in the Autonomy and Controls session.
Andrew Fishberg (ACL) won Best Oral Presentation at the 2024 ETI Workshop hosted by Colorado School of Mines.
Ekaterina Kononov won the Track 3 Best Paper Award at the IEEE Aerospace Conference for her paper “Sensitivity of an Electromagnetic Vector Sensor.”
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Chloe Gentgen (ESL) won the 2023 Zonta Club Amelia Earhart Fellowship. The $10,000 Fellowship is awarded annually to up to 30 women internationally pursuing PhD and doctoral degrees in aerospace engineering and space sciences. | |
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Awards and Recognition: The School of Engineering's Infinite Mile and Ellen J. Mandigo Awards are open for nominations until April 12, 2024. The ceremony will be held in June.
Job Openings: AeroAstro is hiring an Administrative Assistant 2 to support headquarters functions and faculty/principal investigators. Share this opportunity with your networks!
New Additions: Welcoming the newest members of our community, baby Eloise Catalina Linares and baby Zoe Catherine Cordero! Congratulations to the families of Prof. Richard Linares and Prof. Zach Cordero!
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Celebrating Love: A heartfelt congratulations to Beata Shuster on her recent nuptials! The AeroAstro community wishes you a lifetime of joy.
In Memoriam: Our heartfelt condolences go out to Esther Allen on the passing of her father, Robert Allen. We extend our deepest sympathies and support to Esther and her family during this difficult time.
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We were so honored to have AeroAstro alum, NASA astronaut, and USMC Lieutenant Colonel Jasmin Moghbeli answer our community’s questions live from the ISS. Watch the recording to hear what she had to say about her path to becoming an astronaut, leadership on the ISS, and what Unified Engineering taught her about resilience and teamwork. | |
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Hailey Polson ’26 has been sewing ribbon skirts to distribute to children of the Cherokee Nation and is sharing the knowledge of making them with the Indigenous Community at MIT.
On Tuesday, December 19, 2023, two payloads from Prof. Danielle Wood’s Team Space Enabled launched to space via a suborbital flight with the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. The payloads are part of a multi-year research study on the potential for beeswax and candle wax to be used as fuel for satellites in space.
Prof. Julie Shah joined the inaugural AIAA Aerospace Artificial Intelligence Advisory Group to advance the appropriate use of AI technology in aeronautics, aerospace R&D, and space. The group will inform the application of AI across AIAA while maintaining and advancing technical excellence in the aerospace field and more.
Stratospheric safety standards: How aviation could steer regulation of AI in health: In early 2023, Profs. Julie Shah and Marzyeh Ghassemi realized that aviation could serve as a model to ensure that marginalized patients are not harmed by biased AI models in the healthcare system. Their interdisciplinary team of researchers think health AI could benefit from some of the aviation industry’s long history of hard-won lessons that have made air travel one of the safest activities today.
Prof. Wesley Harris was interviewed at the Rosalind Franklin Society's Inspiring Women Transforming Science event in January, spotlighting change makers and leaders advancing the critical contributions of women and underrepresented minorities in science.
Safer skies with self-flying helicopters: In 2021, Course 16 alum Hector (Haofeng) Xu launched Rotor Technologies, retrofitting helicopters with sensors & software that remove pilots from more dangerous flights. Xu envisions a future where safe, affordable, and autonomous aircraft have a positive impact on our daily lives.
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
DEI Best Practices:
Work-Life Balance for Postdocs
Black History Month
AeroAstro’s commitment to celebrating the achievements of Black individuals extends beyond the month of February, but let us take a moment to reflect on and acknowledge the invaluable contributions of African American pioneers to our nation. Standing on the shoulders of those who paved the way for us, we recognize the importance of creating an inclusive space that fosters Black brilliance, pushing the boundaries of academic excellence, and leading the way toward a brighter future.
The Association for the Study of African American Life and History is the founding organization of Black History Month. The 2024 Black History Month Theme is African Americans and the Arts. Read more about the "Origins of Black History Month" view online exhibitions from the Museum of African American History.
The MIT Black History Project documents the role of Black life at MIT since the Institute’s founding in 1861. The Project’s continuing objective is to research and disseminate a varied set of materials that shed light on this rich, significant legacy.
DEI Town Hall Meeting:
Thursday, April 18, 2024, ~12:00-1:00 p.m.
Location: 45-230
Debrief & Lunch: 1:15-2:30 p.m.
Location: 33-116
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Scalable Multi-Robot Collaboration with Large Language Models: Centralized or Decentralized Systems? | Yongchao Chen, Jacob Arkin, Yang Zhang, Nicholas Roy, and Chuchu Fan apply Large Language Models to plan actions for a group of robots whose capabilities are different.
AutoTAMP: Autoregressive Task and Motion Planning with LLMs as Translators and Checkers | Yongchao Chen, Jacob Arkin, Charles Dawson, Yang Zhang, Nicholas Roy, and Chuchu Fan explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate language instructions to formal task specifications that can be solved via a TAMP planner.
Efficient Motion Planning for Manipulators with Control Barrier Function-Inspired Neural Controller | Mingxin Yu, Chenning Yu, M-Mahdi Naddaf-Sh, Devesh Upadhyay, Sicun Gao, and Chuchu Fan propose a deep-learning-based method to find a safely executable path for robot arms with multiple joints.
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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 Workshops and Articles:
Communication Quick Tip Posters
Technical Photography CommKit
Masters Thesis Writing Group: Mondays 3-4pm Rm: 33-116
Minimizing Barriers in Communication Workshop: March 13th 2-3pm
Workshop: Effective Meetings with Advisors: Thursday April, 11, 2-4pm
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Forbes | MIT’s Spark Lab Ponders Better Self-Driving Systems And More | “These capabilities will unlock a huge number of practical applications,” Prof. Luca Carlone says, citing improvements to systems aiding first responders, growing crops, landing space vehicles, or making self-driving cars safer.
EOS | Satellites Map Environmental Vulnerabilities in U.S. Prisons | PhD student Ufuoma Ovienmhada’s team homed in on particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure to describe environmental vulnerability around prisons.
Nature | Opinion: Stop sending human remains to the moon | PhD student Alvin Harvey writes “The Moon is a shared cultural space for humanity…we should be careful, diligent and respectful when visiting her.”
3D Printing Industry | MIT post-processing increases the heat resistance and durability of metal 3D printed parts | “In the near future, we envision gas turbine manufacturers will print their blades and vanes at large-scale additive manufacturing plants, then post-process them using our heat treatment,” Prof. Zachary Cordero says of the new heat treatment method.
Wired | Two Nations, a Horrible Accident, and the Urgent Need to Understand the Laws of Space | “All countries have the right to benefit from space activity.” says Prof. Danielle Wood, after Rwanda unveiled a plan to register some 330,000 satellites, in a proposal made in partnership with the French satellite company E-Space.
NPR | What space stations of the future could look like | “Once you have entrepreneurship and you have a commercial interest, that accelerates technology development for sure,” Prof. Paulo Lozano tells NPR, discussing replacing the ISS.
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