MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics | January 2020
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Featured Image:
A modern airplane’s fuselage is made from multiple sheets of different composite materials, like so many layers in a phyllo-dough pastry. Once these layers are stacked and molded into the shape of a fuselage, the structures are wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens and autoclaves, where the layers fuse together to form a resilient, aerodynamic shell. Postdoc
Jeonyoon Lee
(pictured), Prof.
Brian Wardle
and collaborator Seth Kessler of Metis Design Corporation developed a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels. The technique may help to speed up the manufacturing of airplanes and other large, high-performance composite structures, such as blades for wind turbines.
Learn more.
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A Note from the Department Head
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Dear AeroAstro Community,
I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who attended the Town Hall meeting on Jan. 14. I appreciated the opportunity to hear your concerns and, to the best of my ability, address any questions that you may have around
the investigation
into MIT’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein. As I have mentioned before, the nature of the crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein is deeply disturbing to us all and the errors of judgement exhibited by some in MIT leadership are a matter of great concern.
While the Institute works to, among other things, strengthen whistleblowing processes according to
a letter from President Reif
, a third-party anonymous reporting hotline for whistleblower or other complaints about wrongdoing and violations of Institute policy can be found
here
. We mentioned several Institute-level resources in the Town Hall — including
on- and off-campus resources for survivors and individuals impacted by trauma
,
MIT student support resources
,
MyLife services for faculty and staff
,
MIT Ombuds Office
, and
MIT Title IX.
I also want to emphasize that my door is always open to hear your feedback and concerns, and I encourage you to reach out to members of our HR team, Brían O’Conaill and Hannah Ovaska, if you are more comfortable speaking directly with them.
In the coming weeks, you will receive a link to take the MIT Quality of Life survey, which asks about the work you do and the resources available to you, the climate of your department, lab, or center, and the ways in which life outside MIT integrates with your work responsibilities. Your individual responses are kept confidential and will inform policies and practices both Institute‐wide and at the departmental level. Together, we can apply the lessons learned from the Epstein incident and the data gathered from your collective voices via the survey to strengthen our own community.
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Daniel Hastings
Department Head, MIT AeroAstro
Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor
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Upcoming Events and Announcements
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DI&I Events:
Friday, Jan. 24 | Noon | 33-218
Blind Spots Dialogue & Lunch
The program will provide a space for the AeroAstro community to come together and discuss relevant topics and issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Going forward, each meeting will have a centralized theme. The first meeting will be a follow up discussion to the implicit bias presentation and the Harvard Implicit Association Test.
Please RSVP here
.
Tuesday, Jan. 28 | 11 a.m.-Noon | 33-218
DI&I Committee Meeting
Save the Date:
- Feb. 7: DI&I Town Hall Meeting | 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. | 35-225
- Feb 18: The Minta Martin Lecture, to be given by David Thompson, former CEO of Orbital ATK and Hunsaker Professor at MIT
- April 29: The Gardner Lecture, to be given by Charles Bolden, former NASA Administrator, Major Gen (RET), USMC, and former Shuttle Commander
Announcements
The MIT International Scholars Office (ISchO) wrote to international scholars at MIT who hold F-1 STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) about potential visits to campus by agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to verify employment status. Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research,
spoke with
MIT News
to clarify the notification and offer guidelines for the community.
Last year, MIT faculty approved a series of changes to the Academic Calendar, ranging from the spring final exam schedule and the Patriots’ Day holiday to grade deadlines and the number of spring class days, which goes into effect for the Spring 2020 semester.
Learn more
.
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Noteworthy News, Awards & Honors:
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- Dava Newman was elected a board member to The Aerospace Corporation, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (like Lincoln Labs) that addresses complex problems across the space enterprise and other areas of national significance through agility, innovation, and objective technical leadership.
- Wesley Harris was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in recognition of his research advances in aerodynamics, shock wave structure and blood flow modeling, and leadership in developing government strategic programs and policy in aerospace engineering.
- Aviation Week Network, in collaboration with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) named Kanika Gakhar, Katherine Carroll, Paula do Vale Pereira, and Laura Yenchesky among the winners of “Tomorrow’s Technology Leaders: The 20 Twenties.” The awards recognize students earning STEM degrees who are nominated by their universities on the basis of their academic performance, civic contribution and research or design project.
- Recipients of Spot Appreciation Awards for the month of December include: Quentin Alexander, Brían O'Conaill, Fran Marrone, Joyce Light, Pam Fradkin, Vasileios Tzoumas, and Bryt Bradley.
- GWAE (Graduate Women in Aerospace Engineering) held officer elections in December. The new Co-Presidents are Sydney Dolan and Katie Carroll. Rosemary Davidson was re-elected as Treasurer. These three now lead GWAE's executive board, which consists of a team of more than 20 women graduate students who volunteer their time to organize outreach, mentoring, professional development, and community building programs. The current leadership term will run for the calendar year, January-December 2020. Outgoing co-presidents Jessica Todd and Elizabeth Qian served from May-December 2019.
- Soufyane “Soufy” Missbahelidrissi will be joining the Department on Jan. 27 as an intern as part of the YearUp Program. Year Up’s mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by ensuring that young adults gain the skills, experiences, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through careers and higher education. Soufy will be assisting in an administrative assistant capacity for various operations in the department. Please stop by HQ to introduce yourself!
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We have hit a milestone. We began the first of 47 mini-piles, the deep foundation systems that will support the WBWT and the new addition that will connect Building 17 to the Hangar in Building 33. This work is scheduled to take 30 work days. If you have questions or concerns, email
wbwt-info@mit.edu
.
WBWT fundraising brochures are available for pickup in AeroAstro HQ. Email
Kate Reynolds
for more information.
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Diversity, Innovation, and Inclusion (DI&I)
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Chinese New Year takes place between Jan. 25-Feb. 4. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is hosting an event on Feb. 1 to ring in 2020, which marks the Year of the Rat.
Learn more
.
Diversity Best Practices
For Faculty:
Submit Nominations for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholars.
Learn more.
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JGR Atmospheres
PI: Carmen Guerra-Garcia
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
PI: Luca Carlone
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Below are a few highlights of AeroAstro media coverage:
Jeff Hoffman
NPR
Sara Seager
Forbes
John Hansman
Yahoo! Finance
Charlie Duke SM’64
Houston Chronicle
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Featured Video: MIT Portugal Program
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On Dec. 11, three students from the MIT Portugal Program launched their experiment into space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
Lígia Fonseca Coelho
and
Manuel Almeida
(both of Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico) and MIT AeroAstro graduate student
Jeremy Stroming
collaborated remotely over the course of the year to design, develop and build their nano-experiment to measure the effects of parabolic flight on the photosynthesis and survival of microorganisms. After months of emails and Skype meetings, the team met at MIT in early November to assemble and ship their hardware to Blue Origin’s Texas launch site.
Learn more about MIT Portugal.
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Scenes from AIAA SciTech Conference 2020
in Orlando, Fla.
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Keynote Presentations
(above)
Wes Harris
"Multi-Use Aerospace Technologies"
(left)
Danielle Wood
"Using Space to Support a Sustainable Society"
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Awards
Jon How
(above, left)
2020 AIAA Intelligent Systems Award
“for outstanding and sustained contributions to the decision-making and control of intelligent autonomous aerospace vehicles”
Michael Kapteyn
(above, right)
Southwest Research Institute Student Paper Award in Non-Deterministic Approaches
"Toward reliable digital twins via component-based reduced-order models and interpretable machine learning"
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Student Presentations
Charles Oestreich
(below, left)
(and Tae Lim and Randy Broussard)
"On-Orbit Relative Pose Initialization via Convolutional Neural Networks"
Bryce Doerr
(below, right)
(and Richard Linares and Roberto Furfaro)
"Space Objects Maneuvering Prediction via Maximum Causal Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning"
(left)
Grad students
Bryce Doerr
,
Charles Oestrich,
Daniel Miller
, and
Dan Jang
observed as SpaceX launched Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral.
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Department Highlights in Photos
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As part of her research working with John Hansman, PhD student
Jacquie Thomas
has been developing a redesigned flight procedure called a delayed deceleration approach that generates less noise for the communities surrounding airports and burns less fuel, reducing carbon emissions. After being selected by Boeing’s 2019 ecoDemonstrator program, Jacquie's flight procedure was test-flown on a Boeing 777 ecoDemonstrator aircraft flight from Frankfurt to Atlantic City. Stay tuned for the full story in
MIT News
!
(L to R: Ruth Morlas, Boeing Test Pilot; Gail Barker, Boeing Airport Noise Engineer; AeroAstro grad student Jacquie Thomas; and Jeanne Yu, Boeing, Director of Technology Integration/ecoDemonstrator)
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A team of more than 35 members of the AeroAstro community — including staff, students, alumni and friends of the SSL, STARlab, and SPL — ran the Cambridge YuleFest 5K on Dec. 18.
Photos provided by Becky Masterson.
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Luca Carlone’s 16.485 (Visual Navigation for Autonomous Vehicles) class celebrated the end of the Fall 2019 semester with a group photo. VNAV covers both mathematical foundations and state-of-the-art implementations of algorithms for vision-based navigation of autonomous vehicles (e.g., self-driving cars, drones).
Learn more about the class.
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Work to install the foundation system for the new and improved WBWT has begun!
Photo provided by Anthony Zolnik.
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Do you have highlights to include in future editions of the Monthly Roundup?
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