News & Honors

• In a follow-up event to the MIT-Cambridge sustainable aviation workshop for United States, United Kingdom, and European Union policymakers in April, the Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment director, Steven Barrett, was one of the U.S. delegates to meet King Charles III at a sustainable aviation roundtable in Cambridge, U.K. on May 9. Barrett addressed the king on the opportunities of contrail avoidance and areas for transatlantic cooperation. The roundtable was part of a groundbreaking event for a new $200m facility in Cambridge, U.K. focused on sustainable propulsion, which is a major expansion to the Whittle Laboratory, who we have enjoyed longstanding collaborations with.

• Chuchu Fan has been selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2023 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

• Danielle Wood was selected as a 2023 winner of MIT's Teaching with Digital Technology Award. The Teaching with Digital Technology Awards are student-nominated awards for instructors who have effectively used digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT. The goal is to recognize instructors for their innovations and to give the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their practices. The awards are co-sponsored by Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor.

• Regina Apodaca, Sydney Dolan, Chloé Gentgen, and Jessica Todd have been selected to participate in NASA’s Planetary Science Summer School for Summer 2023.

• Suhas Prameela was awarded the UC Irvine Early Career Distinguished Scholar Award.

• Rashmi Ravishankar won the CCSE Mathworks research prize for outstanding Master’s research. The prize is awarded to the best Master's thesis in computational research. Ravishankar's thesis proposed, optimized, and validated deep learning frameworks to detect rooftop and commercial photovoltaics.

• Daniel Gochenaur was awarded a Draper Scholars Fellowship as well as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship with sponsorship from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. 

• Palak Patel, a PhD student in necstlab, was awarded a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity (NSTGRO) fellowship with her proposal, "Nanoengineered Ultra High-Temperature Ceramics for High Strength and Toughness Multifunctional Composites for Space Applications."

• Catherine Nachtigal in the SPL was awarded a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity (NSTGRO) fellowship with the proposal "Pixels in Electrospray Thrusters for Ultra-Reliable, Flat-Panel Electric Propulsion."

• Charles Dawson has been selected to participate in the 2023 Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneers Workshop. RSS Pioneers is an intensive workshop for senior PhD students and early career researchers in the robotics community.

• Charles Oman gave an keynote talk on April 18 at an invitation-only Space Motion Sickness Symposium hosted by SpaceX at their Hawthorne, CA facility. Limiting space sickness on crewed Dragon and Starship flights will be important for both safety and customer experience.

• REALM PhD student, Chun Man Oswin So, had a paper, "Solving Stabilize-Avoid Optimal Control via Epigraph Form and Deep Reinforcement Learning," accepted to the 9th Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in Daegu, South Korea in July.

• Brittany Bishop, Polly Harringon, Rodrigo Rose, and Nancy Leveson have had their paper, titled "System Theoretic Process Analysis for Identification of Sources of Mode Confusion" accepted for presentation at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2023 International Annual Meeting. 

• GA^3 won the "Golden Beaver Award (Group)" at the 2023 MIT Student Awards.

• The renewal of the radome at the Green Building has been selected by the Cambridge Historical Commission to receive a 2023 Preservation Award. The ceremony and reception will be held at The Foundry, 101 Rogers Street, on May 25 from 6 - 8pm.

Research

Yue Meng, a 3rd year PhD student in REALM, has had a paper accepted by the 5th Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference. "Hybrid Systems Neural Control with Region-of-Attraction Planner" leverages Lyapunov function theory, proposes a new stability criterion for hybrid systems, and designs a neural network controller to stabilize hybrid systems, with applications like car tracking control on icy roads, jumping robot navigation and controlling bipedal robots.

This year's combined 16.83 (U) and 16.89 (G) senior space capstone design class presented a novel concept for a heliocentric satellite constellation, M-SUN-360 "SUNFLOWER," at 1AU that would be able to observe the sun from all 4pi-steradian angles and at all times. Their design consists of 9 satellites which carry 3 instruments each and would orbit the sun in a symmetrical Walker-Delta pattern at an inclination of 54.7 degrees relative to the ecliptic. The PDR was held on May 16 and NASA's new Associate Administrator for Science, Dr. Nicola "Nicky" Fox was in attendance at MIT. The 34 students in the class collectively won the James Means Memorial Award for Excellence in Space Systems Engineering. The class was co-taught by Olivier de Weck and Edward Crawley, with Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze and Chris Casatelli as CI-M instructors and Leilani Trautman and Nadia Khan as TAs.

Pictured: Daniel Gochenaur, a doctoral candidate in the ESL presenting the orbital dynamics of the M-SUN-360 constellation during the 16.83/89 PDR on May 16.

On May 10, the MIT WORMS team participated as a finalist at the MassRobotics Form & Function Competition at Boston Robotics Expo. The team demonstrated early prototypes of new additions to their modular lunar robotics platform including: teleoperation, machine vision, drilling and gripping.

Pictured: Jacob Rodriguez ‘24, Suchitha Channapatna ‘26, Trevor Johst ’26, Vealy Lai ‘26 and HSL graduate student Michael Brown.

Madeleine Schroeder, Ximo Gallud, Elaine Petro, Oliver Jia-Richards, and Paulo Lozano have a new paper, "Inferring Electrospray Emission Characteristics from Molecular Dynamics and Simulated Retarding Potential Analysis" in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Abstract:

In this work, we present coordinated molecular dynamics, ion cluster acceleration, and retarding potential analysis simulations to determine cluster fragmentation behavior in a realistic emitter geometry for electrosprays operating in the pure ionic regime. Molecular dynamics simulations are used to determine the fragmentation rates of ionic liquid clusters as a function of internal energy, electric field strength, and cluster size. A simplified model of electrospray cluster acceleration is developed from previous electrohydrodynamic emission models and used to simulate retarding potential analysis curves. Fragmentation rates and beam composition are inferred for experimental data based on the molecular dynamics and cluster acceleration simulations. We find that for these experimental data, temperatures of EMI-BF 44 dimers likely range between 590 and 687 K while trimer temperatures are larger between 989 and 1092 K. The percentage of monomers, dimers, and trimers in the beam is approximately 45%, 30%–43%, and 13%–25%, respectively. Both ionic liquid cluster temperatures and beam composition agree with previous analysis of this experimental work, supporting the use of coordinated molecular dynamics and retarding potential analysis as a method of inferring electrospray beam parameters. Insights gained from this simulation process are discussed in the context of currently unexplained electrospray emitter behavior and experimental results including the presence of tetramers and trimers in the beam and fragmentation rates in high electric field regions.

Afreen Siddiqi was invited by IEEE's Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) — Instrumentation and Future Technologies (IFT) Working Group to give a webinar on May 4. The talk was titled "Earth Observation Technical Performance Trajectories for Technology Roadmapping and Investments."

Abstract:

Technological capabilities in Earth observation (EO) systems are rapidly changing. Understanding these trends allows for developing baselines for future technology performance projections that can guide mission planning and technology investments decisions. Using an extensive database of over 5000 records of earth observation spacecraft since 1960s, this work empirically models quantitative trends in earth observation technologies and shows temporal change in performance metrics such as resolution, data rate, mass, and design life of EO instruments including passive optical and Lidar systems. The empirically derived technological trajectories are projected for mid (2030) and long-term (2040) scenarios and implications for technology portfolio investments, using Markowitz theory, and mission planning with technology roadmapping methods are discussed.

A survey on the current state of roadmapping was published by the Fraunhofer Institute (in German) with contributions from Sven Schimpf (Fraunhofer), Robert Phaal (University of Cambridge), Olivier de Weck and Thomas Abele. The study revealed that a larger percentage of companies uses roadmapping for strategic planning purposes compared to the last study in 2015.