Space

Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist, space environmentalist and aerospace engineer at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.” The award recognizes Jah’s work to track and monitor the more than 30,000 human-made objects orbiting the earth.

Meet Sepehr Bastami, an aerospace research engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Bastami conducts cutting-edge aeronautics research, serving on two projects related to sustainable aviation and human contributions to safety in aviation.

Moriba Jah is many things: astrodynamicist, “space environmentalist,” professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, and core faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Now he adds another title: chief scientific advisor for Privateer, a company led by Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

The second generation of NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) is responsible for taking important measurements of our planet's key health indicators, including ice sheet mass balance, depth of bodies of water, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. Today marks three years since ICESat-2 launched. It is the descendant of the original ICESat, and the satellite provides scientists with key information about how the planet is changing in response to a rapidly evolving climate. And leading scientific development of this important program is a fairly new Texas Engineering faculty member. 

The University of Texas at El Paso and The University of Texas at Austin have signed agreements with the U.S. Space Force to provide advanced research and workforce development for the newest branch of the U.S. armed services. The University of Texas System signed an umbrella memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Space Force as part of the comprehensive agreement.

We’ve heard a lot about missions to Mars lately, but what about Venus? It’s been 40 years since a spacecraft has landed on Venus. NASA’s interest has spiked in Earth’s planetary neighbor, and aerospace leaders of tomorrow are already tackling the hurdles of landing on our so-called sister planet.

NI, formerly National Instruments Corporation, is supporting the Texas Rocket Engineering Lab (TREL) in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin with equipment, software and guidance in TREL's mission to launch a 28-foot-liquid bipropellant rocket into space by the end of 2021. TREL is an interdisciplinary research lab in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics that prepares students for a new era of human spaceflight through hands-on projects in rocketry and aerospace.

NASA is funding a major project on the future of autonomous air cargo transportation, and The University of Texas at Austin will be playing a lead role. The COVID-19 vaccine rollout — the largest global logistics effort since World War II — has underscored the importance of increasing efficiencies in the global supply chain infrastructure. Autonomous aerial vehicles have the potential to revolutionize cargo transportation.

NASA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research are backing a team of four universities, led by The University of Texas at Austin, in a project to redefine sensing and analysis of hypersonic vehicles, which can travel at least five times the speed of sound and potentially revolutionize space and air travel.

Leveraging the expertise of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Center for Space Research and Texas Spacecraft Laboratory, an international team of engineers and scientists are embarking on a three-year project to develop a new nanosatellite dedicated to gravimetric and thermospheric density studies.

Most humans will never set foot on the moon, but a group of students from the Cockrell School of Engineering have an intriguing idea to let anyone make their mark there. The project, a rover that could write short messages on the surface of the moon, was recently recognized as part of a NASA design contest.

Under NASA’s Artemis program, the agency plans to send humans back to the moon by 2024 — and small spacecraft will help blaze the trail. A partnership between The University of Texas at Austin and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston was one of nine university-led groups selected by NASA to advance these spacecraft, which can be as small as a shoebox or as large as a refrigerator.

When Cockrell School alumna Jill Meyers opens her laptop, an image of a Pilatus PC-12 in flight lights up the screen, serving as a daily reminder of the inspiration for her career in aerospace engineering.

A remote glacier on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula has been named after GRACE, the satellite mission developed by Cockrell School of Engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Austin almost two decades ago. This is in recognition of the contributions made from the data collected by the Earth observation twin satellite system — data that has helped engineers and scientists understand climate patterns in one of the most remote places on Earth.

The World Economic Forum has announced the introduction of a Space Sustainability Rating (SSR) system to help tackle the problem of space traffic and congestion in the Earth’s orbit. The program will be led by a global team of experts in the field, including the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Moriba Jah, an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.

The University of Texas at Austin team that led a twin satellite system launched in 2002 to take detailed measurements of the Earth, called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), reports in the most recent issue of the journal Nature Climate Change on the contributions that their nearly two decades of data have made to our understanding of global climate patterns.

The University of Texas at Austin and Firefly Academy, a nonprofit organization run by Austin-based firm Firefly Aerospace, have partnered to establish Firefly@UT — a $1 million, multi-year program that, for the first time, will offer UT students the opportunity to design, develop and assemble an industrial-scale rocket capable of launching to the edge of space.

As spacecraft re-enter the earth’s atmosphere, there is one major piece of equipment that protects astronauts from the onslaught of hot gases that surround the vehicle: its heat shield. When the spacecraft hurtles through the atmosphere, the heat shield is designed to ablate, or erode away, as outer layers of the shield material are turned into a gas that takes the heat with it and leaves the rest of the material behind.

Bryce Strauss graduated from the Cockrell School of Engineering with his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering in May 2015. Now, only a year later, Strauss will be on console at mission control as a mission operations systems engineer for the critical moment when NASA’s Juno spacecraft enters Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016.

Behind every successful spacecraft mission is a team of experts running thousands of calculations to accurately predict what could go wrong and avoid costly mistakes. For this level of mathematical prediction, NASA is turning to Brandon Jones, an uncertainty quantification researcher and aerospace engineering professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering.