MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics | October 2020 |
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A Note from the Department Head |
Dear AeroAstro Community,
Regardless of political views, election season can be particularly stressful and even overwhelming for many. Coupled with the stress of a global pandemic as an unprecedented academic semester begins to wind down, it only does more to contribute to these feelings of uncertainty. Following the Institute’s lead, there will be opportunities next week for our community to gather and check in with one another, so keep your eyes out for emails from the Department and from MIT with further details.
What I know for sure is that during these extraordinary times, our community has stepped up to help in extraordinary ways. I want to direct your attention to a recent letter by President Reif, where he included support resources both for staff and for students. Together, we have risen to meet challenge after challenge, and we have supported each other through it all in accordance with the values we embody that guide us through everything we do. I am confident that whatever we may face, we will face it together.
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Daniel Hastings
Department Head, MIT AeroAstro
Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor
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DI&I Events
Thursday, Nov. 5 | 2-3 p.m.
"Doing Diversity: A Road Map to Change"
Join us for a presentation by Pamela Newkirk, PhD, a journalist, New York University professor, author and multi-disciplinary scholar whose work examines contemporary and historical depictions of African Americans in popular culture. Her latest book Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of Billion-Dollar Business, exposes the decades-old practices and attitudes that have made diversity a lucrative business while they fail to realize diversity.
Thursday, Nov.12 | 4-5 p.m.
LGBTQIA+ Meeting
All members of the AeroAstro department are welcome, allies and the LGBTQ+ community alike.
Tuesday, Nov. 17 | 11 a.m.-Noon
DI&I Meeting, open to all!
Nominate your colleagues for the 2021 MIT Excellence Awards + Collier Medal by Dec. 7!
This year, perhaps more than any other in decades, has created unprecedented challenges for the entire MIT community. Many staff members are balancing working remotely with personal commitments, such as caring for children or other family members and supporting friends and loved ones affected by Covid-19. Nominate your colleagues who have gone above and beyond in extraordinary ways, and nominate them for the 2021 MIT Excellence Awards + Collier Medal.
Nominations for the Excellence Awards, the highest honors for Institute staff, can be for teams or individual colleagues, and any member of the MIT community is eligible for the Collier Medal. Background about the awards, including awards criteria, is available on the Human Resources website. The nomination deadline is Monday, Dec. 7.
Nominate students, alumni, staff and faculty Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award by Nov. 30
MIT alumni/ae, undergraduate and graduate students, staff and faculty are eligible for nomination for this award. Both individuals and groups, including living groups and student and professional associations, may be considered. Service to the community is defined in the broadest sense and includes academic, research, religious and secular contributions in which integrity, leadership, creativity and positive outcomes are apparent. If you wish to nominate a person or organization, please submit your nomination by November 30, 2020.
Explore WISDM by the MIT Innovation Initiative
MIT Innovation Initiative launched a digital community designed to magnify the work and voices of the incredibly innovative women at MIT: WISDM—the Women in Innovation and STEM Database at MIT. WISDM is a curated searchable database of women in STEM and Innovation at MIT that makes it easy to find talented and diverse innovators to speak at events, collaborate on new ventures, or serve as key opinion leaders on emerging technology. Current MIT graduate students, postdocs, technical associates, or research staff members are eligible to join and can sign up using this short form. WISDM welcomes those who are pursuing STEM education or research, or have work experience in for-profit or non-profit STEM ventures. Learn more.
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Noteworthy News, Awards & Honors: |
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Oli de Weck submitted a proposal that was selected by NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate The Advanced Space Technology Roadmapping Architecture (ASTRA) project will develop and deploy a state-of-the-art methodology for space technology valuation and technology portfolio construction using both integrated modeling and simulation and rigorous Markowitz portfolio theory.
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Chuchu Fan received a Coordinated Science Laboratory PhD Thesis Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Learn more.
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Paula do Vale Pereira was named a “Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering”, a joint effort between MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley to support senior grad students and postdocs who are considering a career in academia. Recipients represent a commitment to excellence by providing leadership in research, service, or teaching toward building an equitable and diverse scholarly environment. Learn more.
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Grad student Stewart Isaacs received a Hugh Hampton Young Fellowship from MIT's Office for Graduate Education. The fellowship recognizes academic achievement across multiple disciplines and to honor students who possess exceptional character strengths. Read the full story.
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Recipients of Spot Appreciation Awards for the month of October include: Joyce Light, Fran Marrone, Sara Cody, Jei Lee Freeman, Afreen Siddiqi, and Maha Haji.
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Grad students Jess Todd, George Lordos, Ben Martell, and Becca Browder, along with MechE student Cormac O’Neill, wrote the first publication for the new ASCEND conference.
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Jon How received the 2020 AWS Machine Learning Research Award for his proposal "Fast Adaptation via Meta-Learning in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning.”
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Grad student Björn Lüjens was part of a project team that won second prize in the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (JWAFS) Food & Agriculture video competition for their project, OneForest! The project goal is to create a cheaper and more accurate way to monitor forest carbon offsets projects with drones and machine learning. Watch the video and read more about the project.
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Julie Shah and Laura Major SM’05 co-wrote a book urging designers to rethink not just how robots fit in with society, but also how society can change to accommodate these new, “working” robots. “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration,” was published this month by Basic Books. Read more.
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The WBWT construction continues as planned. Over the next several weeks, the tunnel’s balance will be delivered for calibration, the glass curtain walls will be installed, and the complex, including building 17, will be closed up to the elements by Thanksgiving. The components of the wind tunnel shell will start to arrive in mid-December for installation.
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Daily work hours for the WBWT construction crew continue from 6 a.m.– 4 p.m. Some Saturday work may be expected. Construction is scheduled to continue through Spring 2021.
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Diversity, Inclusion, & Innovation (DI&I) |
DI&I Best Practices
15 LGBTQ-identified Penn students tell faculty what they need in order to fully participate and learn in the classroom.
Celebrate National Native American Heritage Month:
“November is Native American Heritage Month, or as it is commonly referred to, American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.” This is a time to “celebrate rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories and to acknowledge the important contributions of Native people.”
MIT Land Acknowledgement
"MIT acknowledges Indigenous Peoples as the traditional stewards of the land, and the enduring relationship that exists between them and their traditional territories. The land on which we sit is the traditional unceded territory of the Wampanoag Nation. We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of their territory, and we honor and respect the many diverse indigenous people connected to this land on which we gather from time immemorial."
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Successful ~*VIRTUAL*~ Thesis Defender |
Congratulations
Dr. Antonio Teran Espinoza!
October 8, 2020
"Versatile Inference Algorithms using the Bayes Tree for Robot Navigation"
PI: Prof. David Miller
Did you successfully defend your graduate thesis? Send a photo to aa-communications@mit.edu to be featured as one of our Successful Defenders!
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“It’s intimidating to look toward academia and industry and not see yourself represented. I wanted to teach the students to never let their identities hold them back. To me, Black excellence is the standard, not the exception.”
Kofi Blake’21
while reflecting on his experience at MIT and his mission to share his passion for the technical challenges of aerospace engineering in a profile featured on MIT News.
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An MIT-led model forecasts the Covid-19 crisis from a holistic approach that considers interactions between the economic, health, and social systems. Oli de Weck spoke with MIT News about some surprising trends that the model reveals, and why viewing the pandemic from a systems standpoint will help countries get ahead of the virus. Read the full story on MIT News.
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Below are a few highlights of AeroAstro publications and media coverage: |
Dava Newman & Cody Paige
Scientific American
Richard Binzel
CBS Boston
Sara Seager
BBC Outlook
William Swelbar
Marketplace
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On Sept. 30, the MIT community came together to celebrate the career of Institute Professor Emerita Sheila Widnall, who recently retired after spending 64 years at MIT. The virtual event featured remarks from MIT leaders, current and former secretaries of the U.S. Air Force, and Widnall’s faculty colleagues from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), who spoke of her impact at MIT and beyond. Read the full story on MIT News.
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Looking back: FY21 MIT AeroAstro and JPL Strategic University Research Partnerships (SURP) |
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Opportunities to submit FY22 Concept papers for funded research collaborations with JPL will open soon, for submission by December 2020. There will be a down-selection process to move toward full proposals that will be due in the January/February 2021 time frame. Apply here.
FY21 projects included the following:
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A few project highlights:
Accelerating MCMC to Operational Speeds: This ongoing SURP is a collaboration of graduate student Kelvin Leung, research scientist Jayanth Jagalur-Mohan, and Professor Youssef Marzouk at MIT AeroAstro with Amy Braverman (project PI), Jon Hobbs, Vijay Natraj, Jouni Susiluoto, and David Thompson at JPL. Our objective is to develop Bayesian methods for Earth remote sensing that are sufficiently fast for operations. Current retrieval algorithms—e.g., for estimating surface reflectances from radiance data—provide only point estimates and incomplete uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods can provide comprehensive uncertainty quantification, but have been too expensive for practical remote sensing. Our approach involves constructing sparse linear approximations of radiative transfer models, performing dimension reduction in both the parameter and observation spaces, and using this structure to accelerate posterior sampling algorithms.
Alternative Methods for Acceleration of Wavefront Control Computation for Large Space Telescopes: With a goal of being able to “dig a dark hole” deep enough to take a picture of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting its host star, graduate student Christian Haughwout, postdoctoral researcher Leonid Pogorelyuk, and Prof. Kerri Cahoy at MIT AeroAstro have been working with Dr. Eric Cady (JPL) to assess computational needs and available space hardware components. The team has been working to logically evaluate the computational complexity, memory, and processing needs of several algorithms for high contrast wavefront sensing and control, as well as assessing state of the art components and identifying future promising technologies and architectures.
Orbit Determination via image simulation and processing for Exoplanet Direct Imaging Missions: We know that exoplanet systems can have multiple planets. While we have existing tools to fit promising orbit solutions to single-planet scenarios (including MCMC!) and approaches for fitting orbits to a multi-planet system *if* you happen to have a good guess for which dot is which planet over several epochs, how do you do a better job at solving this problem when you aren’t really sure which dot is which planet? Graduate students Rachel Morgan, Jenny Gubner, Sophia Vlahakis, Sammy Hasler, postdoctoral researcher Leonid Pogorelyuk, undergraduate Sophia Wang, and Prof. Kerri Cahoy at MIT AeroAstro are working with Dr. Rhonda Morgan to simulate multi-planet data, test new multi-planet orbit-fitting algorithms, and use the results to help better plan for future observatory operations.
Concurrent Engineering & Lifecycle Product Development: Research Opportunities for the Next Generation of Space Systems Engineers. There’s nothing quite like learning from experts and hearing about real-out-of-this-world applications for MIT undergraduate and graduate students. JPL engineers and topic experts both challenge MIT students in space systems engineering project courses to contribute to ongoing mission design and development processes and tools as well as innovating new technologies to solve current challenges, including demonstrations of electrospray propulsion on Earth-Observing CubeSats, astrophysics small satellite missions, and operational autonomy. Guided by talented MIT AeroAstro alumni at JPL including David Sternberg, Mitchell Ingham, Jennifer Maxwell, Farah Alibay, and Sydney Do, engagement with MIT’s 16.83, 16.831, 16.851, and 16.89 projects and reviews sharpen MIT students’ skills and can lead to continued collaboration through summer or IAP internship experiences. This fiscal year’s program extends an extensive history of JPL support of the Course 16 space systems engineering classes.
Quantifying the Effect of Dust on Solar Energy Generation in Burkina Faso: Although Burkina Faso and the region of West Africa generally receives a relatively large amount of solar irradiance, this region is positioned below the Sahara Desert, a location well known as a source of dust aerosols. During the annual Harmattan season (approximately December to March), winds carry this desert dust into the area which leads to a sharp reduction in solar irradiance while reducing panel effectiveness when this dust coats solar panel surfaces. Graduate student Stewart Isaacs and Professor Danielle Wood are working with Dr. Olga Kalashnikova (JPL) and Dr. Michael Garay (JPL) to quantify the effects of dust on solar energy systems in West Africa. The team uses both ground-based and satellite aerosol measurements with the open-source solar modeling software, pvlib, to quantify the reduction of solar power due to seasonal Harmattan dust aerosols. The team then evaluates how well existing satellite datasets can capture these effects and describes how dataset limitations may impact the design and performance of productive-use solar systems in the region.
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Grad student Thomas Roberts published a conference paper with his advisor, Prof. Richard Linares, which he presented at the 71st International Astronautical Congress:
Prof. Chuchu Fan’s research group had two papers accepted at the Conference on Robot Learning, which will be held at MIT on Nov. 2020. The titles of the papers are:
- Learning Certified Control Using Contraction Metric
- Reactive motion planning with probabilistic safety guarantees
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Richard Miller, MIT Hunsaker Professor President Emeritus, Olin College gave this year's annual Annual Minta Martin lecture titled “Thoughts on the Future of Higher Education: Lessons from 20 Years of Experimentation at Olin College." Watch the video.
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In the News: #ToBennuAndBack ☄️
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NASA's first asteroid sampling spacecraft is on a 7-year mission to return a pristine sample from asteroid Bennu. NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has successfully stowed the spacecraft’s Sample Return Capsule (SRC) and its abundant sample of asteroid Bennu. On Wednesday, Oct. 28, the mission team sent commands to the spacecraft, instructing it to close the capsule – marking the end of one of the most challenging phases of the mission. Check out the coverage from NASA and learn more about MIT's involvement in the project.
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Carmen Guerra Garcia is teaching 16.55/22.64J: Ionized Gases, which is cross-registered with NSE. This course features a hierarchy of models to study ionized gases or plasmas: including simple description through the motion of charged particles in prescribed electric and magnetic fields, statistical description of those particles through their distribution functions in energy and velocity (this is called kinetic theory), fluid models, and more. Last Tuesday, Dr. Gordon Kohse, Managing Director for Operations of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Lab, performed an experiment at the MIT nuclear reactor on Zoom for the course students. The experiment consisted of measuring the velocities of neutrons escaping the reactor (in a safe and controlled manner of course!) to measure the distribution function of their energies. The video above shows a virtual tour of the nuclear reactor.
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Do you have highlights to include in future editions of the Monthly Roundup?
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