MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics | October 2023

Announcements

Prof. Steven Barrett has been named the new AeroAstro Department Head, effective November 1. Dean Anantha Chandrakasan made the announcement on October 18. Prof. Barrett served as interim department head since May, and succeeds Prof. Daniel Hastings who previously served as department head from 2019 to 2023.

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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Community Corner

Building community, one lunch at a time: The Fradkin Graduate Student Lunch (GSL) is a program sponsored by the GA^3 to strengthen the AeroAstro community by encouraging graduate students to seek out new connections with other graduate students and staff throughout the department. The program is named in honor of staff member Pam Fradkin, who is a tireless advocate of community building.

Congratulations!

Time has named MOXIE to its list of Best Inventions of 2023.

Madelyn Hoying (Human Systems Lab) and Shravan Hariharan (SM '23) are among the students and young professionals named to the 2023 IAF Emerging Space Leaders.

An AeroAstro team received ASME International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI)'s Gas Turbine Award.

Two from AeroAstro among MIT Open Data Prize winners:

Thomas Gonzales Roberts (ARCLab): International Telecommunication Union Compliance Assessment Monitor.
Undergrad Daniel Kurlander, with help from EAPS scientist Jason Soderblom: An Interactive System for Rapidly Filtering and Displaying Images from the Rosetta Comet Mission.

Thomas Gonzales Roberts was awarded the International Strategy Forum PhD Research Fellowship from Schmidt Futures. The fellowship supports field research at the intersection of technology and foreign policy in Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic.

Yue Meng (REALM) has been selected as a 2023-2024 Amazon Robotics Fellow. This fellowship is funded through the MIT Science Hub, a collaboration between MIT and Amazon, hosted by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Prof. Carmen Guerra-Garcia was elected to the Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC) Executive Committee during the 76th Annual Gaseous Electronics Conference, October, 2023 at Michigan University.

Prof. Adrián Lozano-Duran was awarded the NASA Early Career Faculty Award for his project "Machine-Learning Building Block-Flow Model for Large-Eddy Simulation of High-Speed Flows with Strong Heat Transfer and Wall Roughness."

John Thomas (Engineering Systems Lab) was awarded Best Paper for “Safety implications of autonomous vehicles” at the 2023 Symposium of the Society of Flight Test Engineers.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Best Practices:

Leading-in-times-of-trauma, Harvard Business Review

October was LGBT+ History Month, not to be confused with PRIDE. Learn more about LGBTQ+ History Month and Pride Month. You can also learn more about Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) LGBTQ History influential figures at:

NASA Celebrates National Hispanic Heritage Month

A Million Miles Away: A biopic about Jose Hernandez and his path from a farm worker to becoming an engineer and an astronaut.

Unlearning Columbus Day Myths: Celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day

November is National Native American Heritage Month.

MIT DEI Initiatives:

MIT Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, & Composition

AeroAstro DEI Calendar

Highlights

Future Leaders in Aerospace: The 2023 symposium offered candid insights and practical advice for aeronautical and astronautical engineers interested in pursuing academia.

Smudge Before Launch: Watch a short film about the MIT First Nations Launch Team.

A career of education, service, and exploration: Edward Crawley reflects on five decades of impactful work in aerospace engineering and education, at the Institute and beyond.

AEROS CubeSat Mission presented at MIT Portugal Program: Madeline Loui (Sensing, Learning, and Inference group, EECS), Cadence Payne, STAR Lab), and Annika Thomas (ARCLab) participated in the annual conference in Braga this September.

Conservation of Complexity: Prof. Olivier deWeck delivered a keynote at 2023 International Conference on Engineering Design on the First Law of System Science.

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!

Check out our new CommKit article! These articles are quick guides to different aspects of technical and professional communication, designed to be specific to AeroAstro.

Abstracts - by Nick Rober

In October we ran a successful NSF GRFP Workshop in conjunction with EECS. Over 25 undergrad and grad students from AeroAstro and EECS attended to learn how to optimize their personal and research statements. We also held our first staff and faculty Maker Meeting where we learned to use TinkerCAD to make custom 3D printed key chains!

The next Maker Meeting will be held on Monday, November 6 where we will make custom vinyl decals! More information soon.

Research

Aerospace Plasma Group

Two-way interactions of plasma and flame in mesoscale conditions | Aims to address the “backward problem” of plasma-assisted combustion — the influence of combustion on electrical breakdown and discharge dynamics — by systematically exploring the backward problem in plasma-assisted combustion systems.

Long-timescale numerical modeling of streamer discharges | New research describes a numerical model that has been developed to simulate streamer discharges over long timescales of several hundred microseconds.

ARCLab

ARCLab at AMOS Conference 2023 | Researchers from ARCLab presented seven papers at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference, held in Maui this September 19-22.

End-to-end behavioral mode clustering for geosynchronous satellites | A new paper shows that AI can be used to understand satellite behavior from data collected via passive observation.

Engineering Systems Lab

Defining collaborative control interactions using systems theory | A new framework provides the foundation to extend system-theoretic hazard analysis techniques to systematically find collaborative-control causal factors.

System theoretic process analysis for identification of sources of mode confusion | Presents an approach to conducting System Theoretic Process Analysis that is tailored to issues of mode confusion in systems with interactions between human and automated controllers.

REALM

Signal temporal logic neural predictive control | A new paper proposes a method to directly learn a neural network controller to satisfy the requirements specified in STL.

Shield model predictive path integral | New research enables safe high-speed autonomous off-road driving by combining safety certificates called barrier functions with a parallel model-predictive control method. The paper was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, to be presented at ICRA 2024 in May 2024.

NL2TL: Transforming natural languages to temporal logics using large language models | Proposes an accurate and generalizable transformation framework of English instructions from natural language to temporal logic, exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) at multiple stages.

In the Media

Aerospace America | Sticking the landing: Touching down on the moon safely, accurately and autonomously will require highly capable cameras and software. Dominic Maggio (SPARK Lab) and Brett Streetman of Draper take us inside the flight testing of their team's landing system.

MIT ILP | Boosting rocket reliability at the material level | Prof. Zack Cordero's research focuses on extending the lifespan of reusable rockets, while simultaneously reducing the risk of catastrophic failure.

SME Media | An Oxygen Origin Story: Prof. Jeff Hoffman on the MOXIE mission with NASA, what it will take to put people on Mars successfully, and his long career of engineering and exploration.

Communications of the ACM | Certification of Safety-Critical Systems: Prof. Nancy Leveson and John Thomas on seeking new approaches toward ensuring the safety of software-intensive systems.

MIT Spectrum | Mission-driven space scholar sets her sights high: Feature on PhD student (Engineering Systems Lab).

Do you have highlights to include in future editions of the

Monthly Roundup?

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