01-27-22
Undergraduate Maximilian Adang has been awarded the 2022 Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship. The highly selective program awards exceptional college juniors, seniors, and graduate students pursuing aerospace careers with paid internships at cutting-edge commercial space companies. [Class of 2022]
Tags: honors GALCIT MCE CMS Maximilian Adang
01-25-22
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) announced the undergraduate, team, and graduate winners of the 2022 International Student Conference. Luis Pabon Madrid, Polina Verkhovodova, Malcom Tisdale, Isabella Dula, Kaila Coimbra, Tanmay Gupta, Leah Soldner, Rithvik Musuku, and Soon-Jo Chung, Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Research Scientist, received 1st place in the Team Category for "Design of a Modular and Orientable Electrodynamic Shield for Lunar Dust Mitigation." The International Student Conference is an invitation-only student conference where first-place winners from each of the previous year’s AIAA Regional Student Conferences present their winning papers. [AIAA story]
Tags: honors GALCIT MCE Soon-Jo Chung Luis Pabon Madrid Rithvik Musuku Leah Soldner Tanmay Gupta Kaila Coimbra Isabella Dula Malcom Tisdale Polina Verkhovodova
12-09-21
Engineers at Caltech, ETH Zurich, and Harvard are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) that will allow autonomous drones to use ocean currents to aid their navigation, rather than fighting their way through them. "When we want robots to explore the deep ocean, especially in swarms, it's almost impossible to control them with a joystick from 20,000 feet away at the surface. We also can't feed them data about the local ocean currents they need to navigate because we can't detect them from the surface. Instead, at a certain point we need ocean-borne drones to be able to make decisions about how to move for themselves," says John Dabiri, Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering. [Caltech story]
Tags: research highlights GALCIT MCE John Dabiri Peter Gunnarson
11-29-21
A team of Caltech undergraduates participating in NASA's 2021 Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge has earned the award for Best Developed Product. The Habitat Orientable & Modular Electrodynamic Shield (HOMES) team earned the Best Developed Product award, because—as noted by NASA—"it's not a concept; it's reality." [Caltech story]
Tags: GALCIT Charles Elachi Manan Arya Soon-Jo Chung Michael Mello Jason Kastner Richard Abbott
11-04-21
Graduate Student Michael Marshall, and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist; Co-Director, Space-Based Solar Power Project, have won the 2021 AIAA Spacecraft Structures Best Paper Award from AIAA 2021 Scitech Forum. The title of the paper is “Reduced-Order Modeling for Flexible Spacecraft Deployment and Dynamics."
10-15-21
The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that John O. Dabiri, the Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, has been appointed to the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB). The SEAB meets quarterly to advise Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm on how best to achieve the department's priorities and offer recommendations on scientific, technical, and programmatic issues relating to the DOE's mission. "I'm excited to work with the secretary to ensure strong support for fundamental science research, especially in areas where the technological application might be hard to predict today," Dabiri said. "Secretary Granholm's vision to accelerate deployment of climate solutions matches my own sense of urgency to advance sustainability. I'm honored by the opportunity provide advice where it can be helpful for achieving that goal." [Caltech story]
Tags: honors GALCIT MCE John Dabiri
09-22-21
President Joe Biden has announced the appointment of John O. Dabiri, Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Presidents have established advisory committees of scientists, engineers, and health professionals ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt created his Science Advisory Board in 1933. "We're here to provide whatever input the president needs," Dabiri says. "My understanding is that we'll be meeting pretty frequently, as the president wants science to be a big part of his decision-making process." [Caltech story]
Tags: honors GALCIT MCE John Dabiri
08-09-21
Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist; Co-Director, Space-Based Solar Power Project, has been awarded the Torroja Medal from the International Association of Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS). The engraved medal represents the highest individual recognition given by the Association to members or nonmembers of the Association in recognition of outstanding and distinguished contributions to design, construction or research of shell and/or spatial structures. [Past recipients]
Tags: honors GALCIT MCE Sergio Pellegrino
06-24-21
Without GPS, autonomous systems get lost easily. Now a new algorithm developed at Caltech allows autonomous systems to recognize where they are simply by looking at the terrain around them—and for the first time, the technology works regardless of seasonal changes to that terrain. The general process, known as visual terrain-relative navigation (VTRN), was first developed in the 1960s. By comparing nearby terrain to high-resolution satellite images, autonomous systems can locate themselves. The problem is that, in order for it to work, the current generation of VTRN requires that the terrain it is looking at closely matches the images in its database. To overcome this challenge, Anthony Fragoso, Lecturer in Aerospace; Staff Scientist, Connor Lee, Graduate student in Aerospace, Austin McCoy, Undergraduate, and Soon-Jo Chung, Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems and research scientist at JPL, turned to deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to remove seasonal content that hinders current VTRN systems. [Caltech story]
Tags: research highlights GALCIT MCE CMS Soon-Jo Chung Anthony Fragoso Connor Lee Austin McCoy
06-17-21
Simon Toedtli, a graduate student working with Professor Beverley McKeon, is the recipient of the 2021 Richard B. Chapman Memorial Award. His doctoral research combined direct numerical simulations and modal analyses to investigate the physics of closed-loop wall transpiration in a turbulent channel flow and to build low-order flow models for controller design. Both aspects contribute towards the development of drag-reducing control schemes for engineering applications, and will help make future transportation vessels more sustainable. Simon is continuing his studies in fluid mechanics as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he will work on data assimilation for turbulent flows. The Richard B. Chapman Memorial Award is given to an EAS graduate student in hydrodynamics who has distinguished himself or herself in research.
