MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics | October 2021
‌
Announcements
The AeroAstro Diversity, Inclusion, and Innovation (DII) Committee has changed its name to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. It was noted that not having the word “equity” in the committee's name might give the impression that it does not represent the values and actions the committee is working on, which are directly related to equity. As a result, the committee proposed to change its name and voted among several options with feedback from the community. The top choice after this process was the Committee on "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion." While our actions and purpose will not immediately change, the name of the committee now officially has.
The MIT Libraries now has a subscription to The New York Times for all MIT students, faculty, and staff. Visit the MIT Libraries website to learn how to create an account. This page also has instructions for those who already have a subscription - current subscribers will need to cancel their current subscription before signing up for MIT’s access.
 
The following features are included in our NYT subscription:
  • 1851 to current day and all updates
  • International, Spanish and Chinese editions
  • All NYT produced videos, blogs, newsletters, subscriber events
  • Teaching and learning tools with 16 discipline channels, curated articles, discussion questions, co-curricular activities
  • Access through web browser and personal devices
Send your voice to space! A student-run initiative, the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space (HUMANS) project aims to send the message that space is for everyone. All are invited to submit a message to the project website — either text or audio, or both! — sharing what space means to them and to humanity in their native languages. Taking inspiration from One.MIT, a project to etch more than 270,000 names from the MIT community on a 6-inch wafer, they have partnered with MIT.nano to etch both text and audio waveforms onto a 6-inch disk. Finally, in collaboration with the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) at the MIT Media Lab, this new “record of our voices” will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) on a future mission.
News & Honors
  • Chuchu Fan received a Seed Grant from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) for her proposed project “Design automation of safe, robust, and resilient distributed power systems.” MITEI’s Seed Grant program supports research projects from a range of disciplines that seek to address the global climate crisis by improving the efficiency, scalability, and adoption of clean energy technologies.

  • Joshua Fishman, Samuel Ubellacker, Nathan Hughes, and Luca Carlone received the Best Student Paper Award for their entry, “Dynamic Grasping with a “Soft” Drone: From Theory to Practice” at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2021). Read a preprint of the paper and watch the video abstract.
 
 
  • Sandeep Badrinath, Jamie Abel, and Hamsa Balakrishnan, along with our colleagues Emily Joback and Tom Reynolds from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, were awarded Best Paper in the Environment and Energy Efficiency Track, for our paper titled “Spatial modeling of airport surface fuel burn for environmental impact analyses” at the same conference. Read the paper and view the presentation slides.
 
  • Dan Erkel and Thomas Roberts won the COSMIC Student Pitch Competition at Draper Labs' Space Sector Market Conference last month. Their project, "I of HORUS," pitched a lightweight payload for on-orbit space situational awareness using computer vision and machine learning. 
 
  • MIT AeroAstro has kicked off a new Certificate in Aerospace Innovation for graduate students, postdocs, and staff. Our first speaker was Eddie Obropta ’13, SM ’15 from RaptorMaps and our next speaker will be Paul Eremenko ’01, the CEO of Universal Hydrogen in November. There are 25 participants signed up for the 2022 cohort.
 
  • Olivier de Weck is participating in a new Certificate in Strategic Technology Roadmapping with MIT Professional Education. This certificate is for professional engineers and managers who need to manage a complex R&D portfolio and is based on MIT class 16.887 on Technology Roadmapping and Development. More than 200 participants have signed up to date in 2021.

 
  • Rachel E. Morgan has been selected as the recipient of the 2022 Carl E. Nielsen, Jr. Family Fund Award at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where she has a research collaboration in Division 8.
 
  • Spot Award recipients for the month of October include: Amy Jarvis, Marshall Galbraith, and Dave Robertson (x2!) Learn more about how you can recognize your colleagues (note: click "LOGIN" on the top right menu to log in via Touchstone to view internal pages) with AeroAstro's Spot Recognition program.
 
  • Paula do Vale Pereira was awarded the American Astronautical Society (AAS) Molly Macauley Award! The award recognizes “future space industry leaders by awarding and contributing to the professional development of a set of outstanding college and university students”.
Research
On Oct. 16, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, beginning a 12-year, nearly 4-billion-mile mission to explore some of the oldest objects in the solar system. Named after the famous Australopithecus fossil “Lucy,” the spacecraft will make two slingshot trips around Earth before heading toward a cluster of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit, called the Trojan asteroids. These are believed to be nearly as old as the solar system itself.
Project scientist Richard Binzel (above, left) spoke to MIT News about the goals of the Lucy mission. Cathy Olkin ’88, PhD ’96 (above, right) is second-in-command as the deputy principal investigator on the mission.
Two papers from the Aerospace Controls Lab (ACL) have been accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO):
"MADER: Trajectory Planner in Multi-Agent and Dynamic Environments"
Jesus Tordesillas and Jonathan P. How 

Abstract: This paper presents MADER, a 3D decentralized and asynchronous trajectory planner for UAVs that generates collision-free trajectories in environments with static obstacles, dynamic obstacles, and other planning agents. Real-time collision avoidance with other dynamic obstacles or agents is done by performing outer polyhedral representations of every interval of the trajectories and then including the plane that separates each pair of polyhedra as a decision variable in the optimization problem. MADER uses our recently developed MINVO basis to obtain outer polyhedral representations with volumes 2.36 and 254.9 times, respectively, smaller than the Bernstein or B-Spline bases used extensively in the planning literature. Our decentralized and asynchronous algorithm guarantees safety with respect to other agents by including their committed trajectories as constraints in the optimization and then executing a collision check-recheck scheme. Finally, extensive simulations in challenging cluttered environments show up to a 33.9% reduction in the flight time, and an 88.8% reduction in the number of stops compared to the Bernstein and B-Spline bases, shorter flight distances than centralized approaches, and shorter total times on average than synchronous decentralized approaches.
Paper | Video | Code
"FASTER: Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner for Navigation in Unknown Environments"
Jesus Tordesillas, Brett T. Lopez, Michael Everett, and Jonathan P. How
 
Abstract: Planning high-speed trajectories for UAVs in unknown environments requires algorithmic techniques that enable fast reaction times to guarantee safety as more information about the environment becomes available. The standard approaches that ensure safety by enforcing a "stop" condition in the free-known space can severely limit the speed of the vehicle, especially in situations where much of the world is unknown. Moreover, the ad-hoc time and interval allocation scheme usually imposed on the trajectory also leads to conservative and slower trajectories. This work proposes FASTER (Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner) to ensure safety without sacrificing speed. FASTER obtains high-speed trajectories by enabling the local planner to optimize in both the free-known and unknown spaces. Safety is ensured by always having a safe back-up trajectory in the free-known space. The MIQP formulation proposed also allows the solver to choose the trajectory interval allocation. FASTER is tested extensively in simulation and in real hardware, showing flights in unknown cluttered environments with velocities up to 7.8m/s, and experiments at the maximum speed of a skid-steer ground robot (2m/s).
Paper | Video | Code
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
Save the Date: A Virtual Thankful Gathering Nov. 23

Tuesday, Nov. 23
3-4 p.m.

Please save the date for our virtual Thankful Gathering. All are welcome to attend and join the festivities. More details to follow.
By Scott Shigeoka & Jason Marsh | July 22, 2020
 
October is 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:
 





November is National Native Heritage Month, Learn more about National Native American History Month.
From NASA
“In a fitting tribute to the farthest flyby ever conducted by spacecraft, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 has been officially named Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.”

Learn more:

We are thankful for all AeroAstro Veterans. Thank you for your service!
The next Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, November 9, 2021 from 11 a.m.-noon.
Community Corner
There are many ways to create healthy, inclusive, and welcoming academic environments. MindHandHeart worked with offices across campus to compile this series of “Community Cards” showcasing actions –both big and small– that departments can take to strengthen their communities. Search by category (Academics, Community, Inclusion, and Wellbeing) and consider what actions may be right for your department, lab, or center. Click here to view the cards.
Successful Thesis Defenders
Dr. Andrea Scarinci
Robust Bayesian Inference via Optimal Transport Misfit Measures: Applications and Algorithms
September 21
 
Dr. In Young Hur
Forced Response System Identification of Full Aero-Engine Rotordynamic Systems
October 4
 
Dr. Katherine Liu
Improving Autonomous Navigation and Estimation in Novel Environments
October 18
 
Dr. Ezra Tal
Algorithms for Generation and Tracking of Fast and Agile Flight Trajectories
October 22

Did you successfully defend your graduate thesis? Send a photo to aa-communications@mit.edu to be featured as one of our Successful Defenders!
In the News
Below are a few highlights of AeroAstro media coverage:
Highlights
On Oct. 1, a three-year Space Act Agreement between MIT AeroAstro's Space Resources Workshop and NASA Langley Research Center's (LaRC) Deployable Composite Boom team entered into force. 

The objective of this agreement is to collaboratively develop three generations of tall, deployable, and lightweight lunar towers with a view to a near-term Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) technology demonstration opportunity on the Moon. A tall, deployable lunar tower provides a high vantage point for radio repeaters, navigation beacons, imagers, and power beaming systems to support other landers and rovers exploring in and around the challenging terrain of the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar South Pole.

These shadowed regions are believed to harbor reserves of water icebound up in the regolith, making them a prime area of interest for NASA's Artemis campaign. MIT's MELLTT lightweight, deployable lunar tower was conceived and developed by our 2020 NASA BIG Idea Challenge team, and work on this project continued in 2021 with the addition of a deployable guy wire system. 

The pictures are from the most recent test of our tower's new rigging system at a stairwell in Stata Center. For any inquiries, please reach out to George Lordos.

Above image, from top to bottom: Ben Martell (G-AA), Joshua Rohrbaugh (senior, Mech E), and Emma Rutherford (junior, Mech E).
 
Below image, from left to right: Alex Miller (G-AA), Joshua Rohrbaugh, Natasha Stamler (senior, MechE), and Ben Martell.
Shravan Hariharan wrote about his experience participating in an analog astronaut mission at the Mars Desert Research Station earlier this year, where he lived with five other crew members in a simulated Martian habitat/environment for two weeks.
Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) awarded MIT’s International Center for Air Transportation (ICAT), led by John Hansman, with the “Logan Star” award for their extensive research on several projects, ranging from airfield surface optimization, Nextgen PBN/RNAV design procedures and advanced air mobility planning. The annual award recognizes Massport partners, including airlines, federal agencies, airport tenants and contractors, who have gone above and beyond in service to customers and for the safety of the airport community. Grad students Sandro Salgueiro and Rachel Price accepted the award on behalf of ICAT during the 16th Annual Massport S.A.F.E. and Logan Stars Ceremony in September.
Sara Cody flew a plane! ✈️ On Oct. 7, she took a Cessna 172 out for a spin as part of an introductory flight lesson at her local airport.   
Do you have highlights to include in future editions of the
Monthly Roundup?