2018 –19 ANNUAL REPORT · 2019. 11. 22. · Foster a culture of innovation in education ... Tia Sutton (BSAE ‘00) has had a career dedicated to improving and protecting our environment

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2018 –19ANNUAL REPORT

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STRATEGIC PLAN STATEMENT Foster a culture of innovation in education and research to enable the creation of ideas, knowledge and practices that will revolutionize aerospace engineering for the benefit of society.

CONTENTS

From the Chair 2

Department News 4

Faculty News 9

Student News 25

Alumni News 37

In Memoriam 39

Directory 40




































































ON THE COVER: ASTRONAUT EDWIN E. “BUZZ” ALDRIN JR., LUNAR MODULE PILOT, WALKS ON THE SURFACE OF THE MOON NEAR THE LEG OF THE LUNAR MODULE (LM) “EAGLE” DURING THE APOLLO 11 EXTRAVEHICULAR ACTIVITY (EVA).ON THIS PAGE: ALDRIN ON THE MOON’S SURFACE, EASILY CARRYING SCIENTIFIC EQUIPMENT THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN TOO HEAVY TO CARRY ON EARTH. THE TWO PACKAGES MADE UP THE EARLY APOLLO SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT PACKAGE (EASEP) ON APOLLO 11. ON THE LEFT IS THE PASSIVE SEISMIC EXPERIMENT PACKAGE (PSEP) AND ON THE RIGHT IS THE LASER RANGING RETROREFLECTOR (LRR).

GREETINGS FROM MICHIGAN AEROSPACEThe 2018–19 academic year was an exciting one! Our sponsored research programs scaled to new heights thanks to several faculty members either leading or participating in cutting-edge research collaborations. Our programs continue to rank among the highest in the nation. As I enter my second year as the Richard A. Auhll Department Chair, I am proud to announce several changes. The first is a new approach toward undergraduate education. We are incorporating computer science, computing, data science, cyber security and other courses into the undergraduate curriculum while simultaneously drawing a theme of leadership, professionalism and engineering ethics. Embracing the future, we will focus on hands-on learning, team projects and systems thinking. To reflect these changes at the undergraduate level, the graduate curriculum is being realigned to encourage cross-collaborative projects.

Five new professors have joined our faculty from interdisciplinary fields. First, Professor James Bagian joins us as Adjunct Clinical Professor from IOE, John Foster joins us as Adjunct Professor from NERS, Julie Young from NAME, Nadine Sarter, Richard W. Pew Collegiate Professor, from IOE and Kathryn Clark joins the department as an Adjunct Associate Research Scientist. Clark is currently a Movement Science Lecturer in the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. We are excited to have them onboard and look forward to the great contributions they will make toward our research and curriculum. You can learn more about each of them on our department website, and why they belong in Aero!

Also new to our department is Lydia Marks-Wilt. She joined us as one of our new Research Administrators. She

is doing a wonderful job working with our two other research administrative staff members. We are also proud to have six new Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) members: Aisha Bowe (BSAE ‘08) is the Founder and CEO of STEMBoard, a technology solutions company for federal and large private-sector clients that also works to educate underserved youth in STEM; Ben Marchionna (BSAE ‘11), who had an extensive career working with Lockheed Martin Skunkworks, but has recently moved back to Michigan to take on the role of Director of Global Operations at SkySpecs; Dr. Dan Patt (MSAE, PhD AE ‘00) is CEO of Vecna Robotics, a leading commercial robotics and industrial automation technology provider; Dr. Joe Rakow (PhD AE ‘04) is the Director of Mechanical Engineering at Exponent, a management consulting

company. Exponent brings together over 90 different technical disciplines to address complicated and pressing issues facing industry and business today; Tia Sutton (BSAE ‘00) has had a career dedicated to improving and protecting our environment at the EPA and as Congressional Coordinator with the Office of Transportation and Air Quality; and the final addition to our board is Mark Fischer, Senior Vice President, Flight Physics, Airbus S.A.S. These additions strengthen an already strong Aero IAB. The IAB serves our department by providing advice on all aspects of our operations and acts to advocate for us on our behalf.

Our faculty, staff and students are striving to improve the culture of our department by establishing our own departmental committees with individualized, targeted objectives.

Professor Ken Powell — our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Faculty Lead — chairs our department’s new DEI committee that includes faculty, staff and undergraduate and graduate students, who serve as liaisons for their respective communities. Powell also serves as Curriculum Committee Chair. His committee is responsible for spearheading the innovative changes to the curriculum I mentioned earlier. Professor Quim Martins serves as our Space Allocation Advisory Committee Chair, to provide the faculty, staff and students with the necessary space for a productive and healthy work environment and to optimize the use of space by identifying and addressing inefficiencies. Finally, we have expanded Kimberly Johnson’s role as Marketing Communications Specialists to include outreach. She is now the Communications & Outreach Specialist and serves as the chair of the AE Outreach Committee. The Outreach Committee includes professors Pete Washabaugh, Luis Bernal and Karthik Durasaimy. Together, they organize the department’s outreach efforts toward bringing awareness of aerospace engineering to K-12 underrepresented

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aero.engin.umich.edu

minorities and female students through events and media, and through creating partnerships with schools that do not currently have an active engineering program on their campus.

While the department as a whole has been busy with these changes, our current professors have not taken a break from their cutting-edge research. Over this past year, our professors have won numerous awards. To mention a few, Dean Gallimore was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) — one of the highest honors for a professor of engineering. Profs. Gamba and Raman received a large DOE award for turbine research, Prof. Martins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Prof. Atkins received an NSF grant for UAS traffic research, Prof. Friedmann was named an Honorary Fellow of the Vertical Flight Society, Prof. Jorns and Prof. Gorodetsky were awarded Young Investigator Program grants for their research, Prof. Inman won a large NSF Center award and Prof. Cesnik continues to direct the Michigan Airbus Center which is producing exciting new technologies for future flight. Furthermore, four papers authored by PhD students and their faculty advisors won AIAA Best Paper awards. These awards only fuel the high quality of research that the Aerospace department continues to conduct and we are excited for everything our distinguished faculty will accomplish.

Collaborations with our neighbor, ClaSP, were highlighted with the launch of the Space Institute in September. The Space Institute vision is to advance the University of Michigan’s world leadership in space. The Space Institute is a collaboration primarily between Aero and ClaSP at U-M — but extending to the whole campus. Profs. Cutler, Gamba, Jorns and Washabaugh are representing Aerospace as leaders in the Space Institute.

Our department suffered a great loss of Emeritus Professor Elmer Gilbert

this past summer. Elmer left a lasting legacy in our research community. He was a great educator, mentor and friend to the department and will be dearly missed. Earlier this year, Elmer and his wife, Lois Verbrugge, established the Ed and Elmer Gilbert Graduate Fellowship Fund, an extremely generous endowed fellowship fund in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. This special fellowship fund will go toward furthering opportunities for Aerospace Engineering graduate students who are focused on control theory and its application. With the establishment of this fund, Elmer and Lois have generously enabled the Department of Aerospace Engineering to recruit the best and the brightest graduate students researching in Elmer’s specialty throughout his career.

As a community, it is good to remember our accomplishments from the past while constantly moving forward toward our future. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 astronauts’ landing on the moon. This accomplishment could not have taken place without the help of Michigan aerospace engineers, such as our very own Aerospace Engineering Professor Emeritus Harm Buning, who trained all of the Apollo crews from the very beginnings of the Apollo program. People like Buning and the many Michigan Aero alumni who were astronauts inspire us every day and we look forward to the next great moments in aerospace history, knowing that Michigan Aerospace Engineering will surely make its mark.

GO BLUE!

Dr. Tony WaasRichard A. Auhll Department ChairFelix Powlowski Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering

Industrial Advisory BoardDr. Kevin Michaels (Committee Chair) Vice President ICF SH&E

Ms. Karen Albrecht Certified Career/Personal Development Coach & Motivational Speaker

Dr. Mauro Atalla Vice President, Engineering & Technology, Sensors & Integrated Systems, United Technologies

Mr. Richard Auhll Chairman, BoD Surgical Eye Expeditions

Dr. Siva S. Banda Chief Scientist, Air Systems Directorate Air Force Research Laboratory (Liaison)

Ms. Aisha Bowe Founder & CEO, STEMboard

Mr. Corey G. Brooker Staff Systems Engineer, Systems Analysis IntegrationHuman Space Flight – Project Orion

Mr. Jim B. DeBoer Senior Principal Systems Engineer, Aerodynamics Department, GNC Center

Mr. Kiko Dontchev Sr. Manager, Dragon Ground and Launch Operations

Ms. Jennifer Duke Director, Aerodynamics, Pratt & Whitney

Ms. Kathryn Elliott Chief of Performance & Aerothermal Systems – Indianapolis, Rolls-Royce Corporation, MC-S2-03

Mr. Joseph Ensor Vice President and General Manager, Northrop Grumman Corporation

Ms. Debra Facktor Vice President and General Manager, Strategic Operations Ball Aerospace

Dr. Marc Fischer Senior Vice President, Flight Physics, Airbus S.A.S.

Mr. Jeff Hamstra Senior Fellow, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company

Dr. Naveed Hussain Vice President, Aeromechanics Technology, Boeing Research & Technology

Ms. Trudy F. Kortes Chief, Space Technology Project Office NASA Glenn Research Center

Mr. Eric Krieg Design Fellow Discipline Lead, Product Lifecycle Management Chief Architect Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne

Mr. Ben Marchionna Director of Global Operations, Skyspecs

Dr. Kevin Michaels Managing Director, Aerodynamic Advisory

Mr. Juan Carlos Ortiz Senior VP Business Development, Aernnova Engineering US, Inc.

Dr. Dan Patt CEO, Vecna Robotics and Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

Dr. Joe Rakow Principal Engineer and Director of Mechanical Engineering, Exponent, Inc.

Dr. Khaled W. ShahwanInnovation & Advanced Development Engineering (ADE), Chrysler Technology Center, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA US LLC)

Ms. Tia Sutton Engineer, Truck and Engine Manufacturing Association

Mr. William Welsh Dynamics Technical Fellow, Sikorsky, A Lockheed Martin Company

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[ F R O M T H E C H A I R ]

FACTS + FIGURES

Facebook Statistics

Current Research Expenditures

$15,350,000Fiscal Year 2019

Clicks

30

Reach

3,324

Likes

8

Retweets

1

Mentions

1

AVERAGES FOR MAY 2018–AUGUST 2019


Twitter Statistics

Clicks

234

Reach

1,542

Likes

47

Shares

3

Comments

2

AVERAGES FOR MAY 2018–AUGUST 2019

32+16+8+2+2+14+6+6+4+10+AAerospace Engineering Faculty

16 Full Professors

8 Associate Professors

4 Assistant Professors

1 Lecturer1 Professor of Practice7 Assistant Research Scientists3 Adjunct Professors3 Adjunct Associate Research

Scientists

2 Adjunct Lecturers5 Additional/Joint Professors


[ D E P A R T M E N T N E W S ]

VENUS2006: Venus Express* launches to probe the planet’s atmosphere

MERCURY2015: MESSENGER* reaches Mercury and discovers ice near its poles

2018: BepiColombo** launches, expected to arrive in 2025 when two orbiters will start an in-depth study of the planet and its environment

EARTH1914: Michigan establishes the first aeronautics degree program

1946: Space Physics Research Laboratory and High Altitude Laboratory founded

1957: “Rocket Panel” meets at Michigan to propose new space

agency: NASA

1963–1968: Harm Buning teaches flight and orbital mechanics to all Apollo astronauts

2008–2019: Multiple CubeSat missions* explore space weather

and develop advanced technologies (RAX-1, RAX-2, Mcubed-1, MCubed-2,

GRIFEX, CADRE, TBEX-1, TBEX-2, QB50)

2016: Michigan-led CYGNSS* eight-satellite constellation mission launches to monitor hurricane intensity

MOON1971: All-Michigan Apollo 15 crew explores the moon (and establishes an alumni club there)

2009: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter** identifies sites for future lunar missions

DEFINING THE PAST,

PROPELLING THE FUTURE

University of Michigan Engineering helped lead space discovery beyond the telescope and into its defining era. Aerospace engineers from the country’s oldest program have been at the forefront, and currently innovate CubeSat missions and

novel space propulsion devices. Our Space Physics Research Lab and Climate and Space scientists build unique instruments to monitor the Earth’s environment and explore our solar system. Our new Space Institute

responds to society’s expanding use of space, encompassing multiple disciplines to advance our collective innovation. We

will continue to protect our most precious planet, while traveling across the solar system —

and beyond.

SUN/HELIOSPHERE1993: New Solar and Heliospheric Research Group provides foundation for space weather research

1997: ACE* satellite starts to provide severe solar storm warnings

2016: DSCOVR* satellite continues real-time solar wind monitoring

2018: Parker Solar Probe* launches to discover how solar storms are born near the sun

2020 (scheduled): Solar Orbiter** will explore how the sun shapes and controls the heliosphere


MICHIGAN’S WORLD-LEADING SPACE RESEARCH AND EDUCATION HAS EXPLORED THE SPACE WEATHER AND HABITABILITY OF PLANETS, INCLUDING OUR OWN, WITH HIGHLY AMBITIOUS CURRENT AND FUTURE SPACE MISSIONS.

BUILDING ON A CENTURY OF HISTORY, OUR

ALUMNI ARE LEADERS AT

NASA, SPACEX, BLUE ORIGIN, LOCKHEED MARTIN, NORTHROP GRUMMAN AND OTHERS.

JOIN US AS WE PROPEL

THE FUTURE.

SATURN2004: Cassini-Huygens* reaches Saturn, discovering Titan’s liquid methane lakes and gas plumes on Enceladus

MARS2003: MarsExpress** studies its atmosphere and environment

2004: Spirit** and Opportunity Rovers** characterize Martian rocks and uncover the history of Martian water

2005: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter** starts monitoring water

2007: Phoenix** examines ice cap with robotic arm

2011: Mars Science Laboratory** brings Curiosity Rover* to assess habitability

2013: Maven** launches to study space weather on Mars

2018: MarCO Cubesats** launch to demonstrate new communication technology

SOLAR SYSTEM AND BEYOND1977: Voyagers 1 and 2** left Earth over four decades ago to study outer planets, and now continue their exploration beyond our solar system

2004: Rosetta** launches to study comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, landing in 2014 to take images and sample its nucleus

JUPITER1995: Galileo* reaches Jupiter to discover an ocean under the icy moon Europa

2016: Juno* reaches Jupiter to explore its gravity, magnetic field and atmosphere

2022 (scheduled): Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer* will take a detailed look at the planet and three of its largest moons

KEY Spacecraft

Spacecraft/Lander

Rover

*With Michigan instrumentation and science**With Michigan science



Carrying astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., the Lunar Module (LM) “Eagle” was the first crewed vehicle to land on the moon on July 20, 1969 in the region known as Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquility).

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2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY: FROM SCIENCE FICTION TO SCIENCE FACT

Does science drive science fiction? Or does science fiction drive science? Three leading researchers explored this question in a panel discussion in September 2018 — part of the College of Engineering’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The panel preceded a screening of the film with live orchestral and choral accompaniment. Michigan Engineering and the University Musical Society co-sponsored the screening, which was one of only three such live performances across the country last year.

Long recognized as one of the greatest science fiction works of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is celebrated for its technological realism. The themes it raises, in artificial intelligence and deep space exploration, remain relevant today.twitter.com/rstocking/status/1043361659912429568’

“The film predicted with eerie accuracy the future of technology,” said Alec Gallimore, the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and professor of aerospace engineering. “It was the first movie I’m aware of that showed iPads, decades before they were invented. It showed space stations and space shuttles as well.”

The film greatly influenced Gallimore, who remembers seeing it when he was just 4 years old. “It caused me to become the person I am. I develop plasma propulsion technology that the movie identifies would be needed to propel astronauts to Jupiter.”

Gallimore and his colleagues on the panel discussed how far we’ve come from science fiction to science fact in

two of the film’s key areas: artificial intelligence and deep space travel.

Conversing with computers

“The HAL 9000 computer that controls the Discovery One spacecraft communicates with the human crew in sophisticated, natural spoken language,” said Rada Mihalcea, professor of computer science and engineering, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “That kind of breezy conversation represents what many consider a pinnacle in artificial intelligence.”

Mihalcea introduced the audience to the Turing Test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950. “To pass, a machine must exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from a human’s. And it must demonstrate this through spoken language. HAL may have passed, but no machine in real life has,” she explained.

Still, the field has come a long way. ELIZA, the computer therapist, was an early natural language processing program developed in the 1960s at MIT. The program used pattern matching to mimic human speech. Mihalcea had a conversation with ELIZA about her talk, to demonstrate its rudimentary capabilities.twitter.com/radamihalcea/status/1043625508536246272

The decades since ELIZA have witnessed exponential advancement, thanks to the explosion of data, the advent of crowd-sourcing and the development of sophisticated algorithms. Artificial intelligence researchers can tap all of these to train intelligent systems. “Today, we have question-answering systems like Siri and Alexa. We have machine translation. We have human-level

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“OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS, HAL.” – 2001: A Space Odyssey

performance speech processing,” said Mihalcea.

She showed a video of Google’s Duplex artificial intelligence system booking a hair appointment over the phone. “There is still a lot to do in terms of developing and building systems that can have natural conversations. But progress is accelerating and this promises even more exciting findings,” she explained.

Can we trust artificial intelligence?

Ben Kuipers, professor of computer science and engineering, studied at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab where ELIZA was developed. Kuipers’ advisor had been a consultant on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the novel that the film is based on, even paid a visit to the lab. In his talk, Kuipers focused on one of the

film’s most startling plot twists. “HAL ends up being a bad guy,” he explained. “He played a pivotal scene.”

Astronaut Dave Bowman commands: “Open the pod bay

doors, HAL.”

HAL responds: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.…This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

As society moves toward autonomous vehicles, this scene has special resonance. “If AI systems start doing this, that could be of considerable concern,” said Kuipers. ”I don’t think we’re in immediate danger of this. We have made dramatic progress over the past 50 years. The AIs we’re building now are really more like idiots savants. They are good at specific things, and bad at everything

else. That approach has a great deal of promise. The risks are manageable rather than catastrophic.”

Nonetheless, this progress has encouraged researchers like Kuipers to explore artificial intelligence ethics — specifically, how ethics knowledge is acquired, represented and used, and how robots can utilize those approaches to treat people appropriately.

Traveling to the planets and beyond

2001: A Space Odyssey takes place on a spacecraft bound for Jupiter. It was released during the Apollo program, in the year before the first manned moon landing.

While humanity has yet to leave the Earth-moon system, we may in the decades to come. Technologies for a trip to Mars are advancing, including in Gallimore’s lab, where he is developing a “Mars engine” that last year broke records for operating current, power and thrust for a device of its kind, known as a Hall thruster. An engine like this could cut the travel time to Mars by at least one-third, and possibly twice that.

Speed in space travel is important for many reasons, not least of which is the vastness of the universe. “If Earth and the moon were about the distance between two of your fingers, Mars would be eight feet away,” Gallimore said. “Jupiter, 65 feet. Saturn, 110 feet. Neptune longer than a football field away. And the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 600 miles away. The galaxy we live in is 100,000 light years wide. The universe is 13 billion light years wide. It’s mind-boggling in size.”youtu.be/drU7VSkW3bw

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MARS INSIGHT ESCORTS: MICHIGAN ENGINEERS BUILT FIRST DEEP-SPACE CUBESATS

In 2018, floating above the surface of Mars, two briefcase-sized satellites ushered in a new era of deep-space exploration. Hitching a ride on an Atlas V rocket alongside the InSight Mars lander [named MarCO-A and MarCO-B], they became the first CubeSats to successfully navigate to interplanetary space and communicate with Earth.

The MarCO mission, undertaken at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the involvement of Michigan Engineering alumni and researchers, proved that small, inexpensive spacecraft can go beyond the Earth’s orbit, exploring further reaches of space that had previously been the realm of larger, more expensive probes. Andrew Klesh (BSE EE ’05, BSE AERO ’05, MSE ’06, MEng ’09, PhD ’09) and Anne Marinan (BSE AERO ’11), played key roles.

“These are our scouts,” said Klesh, the MarCO mission’s chief engineer. “CubeSats, which are small satellites that travel alongside larger payloads, haven’t had to survive the intense radiation of a trip to deep space before, or use propulsion to point their way toward Mars.”

Cubesats have become popular as a relatively inexpensive way to gain a foothold in space. There are already more than 800 of them whirling overhead. But until now, they’ve been confined to near-Earth orbit, about 200 miles above the planet’s surface. The twin MarCO CubeSats shattered that record, traveling more than 97 million miles to complete their mission.

MarCO A and B launched in May 2018 on the same rocket as InSight, a mission to study Mars’ crust, mantle and core and answer questions about how rocky planets form. Shortly after

leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, the MarCOs are ejected from pods near the base of the rocket. After that, they were on their own, spending the next 6½ months on a cruise to one of Earth’s nearest neighbors. They navigated with a custom-designed steering system that used cold, compressed gas jetted from a set of eight nozzles. Along the way, they unfurled solar panels that provided power to a softball-sized radio that enables the CubeSats to beam data millions of miles back to Earth.

“Communication in interplanetary space is a challenge that CubeSats haven’t had to deal with before,” said Marinan, a MarCO systems engineer. “They’re much further from Earth, and so they have to be able to figure out the range and the orbit of the CubeSat. This radio makes that possible.”

The CubeSats also used a newly developed flat X-band antenna that focuses radio waves like a parabolic dish but takes up far less space. Once they arrived near the surface of Mars in November 2018, they connected wirelessly with the InSight lander, relaying data about the landing process back to Earth and sending photos taken with two onboard cameras. “It’s one thing to know MarCo flew by Mars and assume the trajectory worked out. It’s another thing to see the photo your spacecraft took of another planet,” said Marinan. “It was an amazing day and

I don’t think I’m going to forget it for a really long time.”

The work wasn’t crucial to the success of the lander, but Klesh said the MarCO mission breaks new ground as a proof of concept that CubeSats can successfully navigate into deep space and communicate with Earth. Clearing those hurdles opens up a new era of opportunities. Klesh outlined a variety of possible future uses for deep-space CubeSats, including:

• Deploying dozens of CubeSat probes simultaneously at different points around the sun to monitor the solar wind;

• Sending CubeSat probes into the tails of comets — a place too dangerous to risk a large, expensive probe — to monitor their composition and properties; and

• Deploying swarms of CubeSat probes to photograph planets and other objects in the solar system from multiple vantage points, in contrast to today’s large probes, which generally provide only a brief glance from a single vantage point

“CubeSats are very good at focused missions,” said Klesh. “They can do one thing and do that thing very well, so we’re excited to see how this technology can grow in the future.”

James Cutler, associate professor, Aerospace Engineering, was also involved in the MarCO mission. His lab, MXL, built the flight computer and power systems that underpin the CubeSats.

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MXL SENDS TWIN CUBESATS ON FALCON HEAVY’S THIRD LAUNCH

June 2019 marked the third launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. It carried nearly two dozen satellites to space; two of these satellites were developed by the University of Michigan.

The Michigan eXploration Lab (MXL), led by James Cutler, professor, Aerospace Engineering, has partnered with SRI International to develop and launch the Tandem Beacon Experiment (TBEx), a pair of CubeSats each carrying tri-frequency radio beacons, in near identical, low-inclination orbits. They will stay close to the Earth, studying how the dynamics and processes in the troposphere can act to cause variability in the behavior of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.

Of particular concern are “structured bubbles” in the ionosphere that can disrupt radio signals passing through. MXL, SRI International and NASA, which provided funding for TBEx, seek to understand how the distortions from these bubbles can be mitigated, protecting military, airline and GPS signals from interference.

TBEx is only one project of many payloads that launched in June. The mission, dubbed Space Test Program-2 (STP-2) is a U.S. Department of Defense venture managed by the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems

Center. Payloads carried by the rocket will represent research endeavors by NOAA, NASA, U.S. DoD and universities.

SpaceX said that the STP-2 mission will be among the most challenging launches in SpaceX history due to its complexity; it will consist of four separate upper-stage engine burns, three separate deployment orbits and a total mission duration of over six hours.

Current students and alumni were in attendance for the launch. PhD candidate Prince Kuevor, master’s student Paul Knudsen and undergraduate students Michael Wilson and Dan Gu watched the launch along with Aerospace Engineering alumnus Josh Synowiec and Vice President and General Manager of Strategic Operations at Ball Aerospace, U-M alumna Debra Facktor.

A livestream of the Falcon Heavy launch is available at nasa.gov/nasalive.

PROFESSOR JAMES W. CUTLER HELPS FIRST LEGO TEAM BUILD SOLAR OVEN

Every year, FIRST Robotics organizes a competition for 4th- and 5th-graders from around the globe to compete in a robotics and science competition. In addition to making a robot entirely out of LEGOs, this year’s teams are tasked with coming up with a problem associated with prolonged human space travel and finding an innovative solution to that problem.

The Galaxy Bots, FIRST LEGO League team #27434, from Gladstone, Michigan, was one of the many local teams to accept these challenges. In addition to building their robot, they came up with a way to heat food and water in space in a way that doesn’t use extra power. Their solution was a solar oven.

After winning their regional qualifier, Travis Beauchamp, coach of the Gladstone FIRST LEGO League Robotics Team, reached out to the U-M Department of Aerospace Engineering to try to get additional advice on improvements for their solar oven.

Since this year’s competition topic was space, the team contacted Jamie Cutler, professor, Aerospace Engineering, CubeSat pioneer, and space systems expert. After listening to the Galaxy Bots’ description of their problem and the solution, Cutler congratulated the team on their work and provided improvements and suggestions to their design, including insulating the corners of the oven, adding lenses to the front to better focus the sunlight entering the box and changing the material to something stronger and lighter. Before the state competition, the team was able to implement the insulation and lenses Cutler recommended.

At the state competition, the team placed an impressive 14th out of the 60 teams that entered the competition.

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PROFESSOR EMERITUS PUBLISHES A NEW BOOK

The book, Global Formulations of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Dynamics on Manifolds, authored by Taeyoung Lee, Melvin Leok and N. Harris McClamroch, is based on aspects of the doctoral research of Taeyoung Lee from 2004–2008 carried out at the U-M Department of Aerospace Engineering.

The publication was initially developed when all three were at U-M: Taeyoung Lee was a doctoral student in Aerospace Engineering (currently a faculty member at The George Washington University); Melvin Leok was a faculty member in mathematics (currently a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego) and Harris McClamroch was a faculty member in Aerospace Engineering (currently professor emeritus at U-M).

About McClamroch

McClamroch taught courses and carried out research on a diverse set of topics related to dynamics and control. He focused his research in the fields of aircraft flight dynamics and control and spacecraft dynamics, but also worked on problems in robotics, manufacturing, wheeled vehicles and civil structures. McClamroch’s teaching and research is based on nonlinear dynamics, nonlinear control and geometric mechanics, as well as optimization, estimation and mathematical systems theory.

Recent research has treated dynamics and control problems for both rigid bodies and multi-bodies based on novel geometric formulations of dynamics that evolve on a configuration manifold.

McClamroch authored or co-authored more than 250 refereed journal and conference publications. He is the author of three books, including Steady Aircraft Flight and Performance published in 2011, and Global Formulations of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Dynamics on Manifolds: A Geometric Approach to Modeling and Analysis co-authored with Lee and Leok, published in 2017. He was the principal adviser for 27 PhD students. He spent his entire career at U-M, from 1967 until his retirement in 2010.

ROE CELEBRATES 80TH BIRTHDAY AT UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE CONFERENCE

Colleagues and former students of Philip Roe, professor, Aerospace Engineering, met for a small conference at Roe’s alma mater, the University of Cambridge, in July 2018. The subject of the conference was Roe’s main research area of computational fluid dynamics, but the attendees also took the opportunity to celebrate their colleague and former teacher’s 80th birthday. Attendees represented researchers from the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Italy, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium and South Korea.

Following discussions at the conference, Roe committed to two new lines of investigation. The first is a renewed collaboration with Z.J. Wang, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas. “This inquiry is one of the most critical areas of current research, and will examine numerical aspects of methods to

predict turbulent flow by simplifying the treatment of the smallest scales,” said Roe.

The second line of research will be a collaboration with Haran Jackson, a PhD candidate at Cambridge, who is investigating a unified model of continuum dynamics applicable to both fluid and solid behavior. “There are some interesting geometrical issues connected with this that connect with work that I did on the motion of magnetised fluids, and [Jackson and I] intend to follow through on this,” he explained.

Also in attendance was Roe’s son, Gerard, who gave a presentation showing how the predictions of models for climate change can be reproduced by a pair of simple gradient equations. The proceedings of the conference were published in a special issue of the journal Communications on Applied Mathematics and Computation.

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AEROSPACE TOUR INSPIRES LOCAL FIRST LEGO LEAGUE TEAM

In 2018, a group of curious elementary school students filed into the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Building, home of the Department of Aerospace Engineering. The group, FIRST LEGO League team #37463, The Hyper Novas, was eager to explore the theme of last year’s FIRST LEGO League competition: space.

From the moment the team (along with their coach Helen Yuan) walked into the FXB Building, they were surrounded by decades of cutting-edge space research and discovery. In the atrium, they had a chance to watch AERO 205 students practice with their custom-built RC hovercraft and learn about the system used on the hovercrafts. The team’s coach reported that students loved seeing the moon rock in the atrium display cases, as well as exploring labs and student projects to learn more about the department’s spaces.

Aerospace Engineering Technician Chris Chartier led the group to the Gorguze Family Laboratory to explore the wind tunnel spaces and the Michigan Aeronautical Science Association (MASA) rockets. Chartier spoke to the students of MASA’s successes as a student team. One Hyper Nova member recalls, “I like the model rockets U-M students built. They won the competitions!”

The team then moved back to the FXB to see James Cutler, professor, Aerospace Engineering’s Michigan eXploration Laboratory (MXL). PhD student Nathaniel England spoke on behalf of MXL and presented to the team about satellite engineering concepts, most notably the

satellite rotation mechanism and accompanying circuitry. They learned that satellites can communicate with ground stations at U-M and how important designing each individual component is.

Cutler’s MXL provides students with the opportunity to operate, test, build and design small satellites for science and technology demonstrations as well as high-altitude balloon missions or novel flight vehicles. In addition to this, MXL provides outreach opportunities to groups such as The Hyper Novas, as well as partnering with local groups for their launches.

The Hyper Novas came out of the FXB with new knowledge and perspective that inspired them to prepare for their FIRST LEGO League competition.



GORODETSKY AWARDED AFOSR YOUNG INVESTIGATOR PROGRAM GRANT FOR COMPUTATIONAL ALGORITHMS FOR AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

In 2018, Alex Gorodetsky, assistant professor, Aerospace Engineering, was awarded a three-year contract of $450,000 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through its Young Investigator Program (YIP).

His proposal, “Online Reinforcement Learning in Partially Observed Physics-based Environments with Compression-based Computation” discusses the need for progress in computational mathematics and algorithms for reinforcement learning within autonomous aerospace systems.

“Reinforcement learning, or the process of learning to act by interacting with the environment, is traditionally an extremely computationally- and data-intensive procedure,” said Gorodetsky. “If you look at the latest results — for instance, in the area of artificial intelligence for computer games — significant training time (sometimes on the order of days) with large-scale computational resources and extremely large amounts of data is still required. In aerospace applications, these requirements are prohibitive.”

Thus, the goal of Gorodetsky’s research is to develop new computational mathematics to enable autonomous systems, such as dynamic soaring aircraft or drone delivery systems, to rapidly adjust to unforeseen conditions in order to extend their applicability to these important next-generation applications. The algorithms will be deployed on these two applications of autonomous systems

navigating complex aerial environments. These applications are challenging for current approaches because data is often limited, the environment is rapidly changing and the autonomous platform may have limited onboard computational power.

Gorodetsky provides an example of a high-altitude autonomous glider, which could have atmospheric science research applications like the Perlan Project aircraft. “High altitude autonomous gliders have the capacity to enable long-duration missions for monitoring and/or tracking,” he explains. “The way they can do this is by identifying thermals and up-drafts in the atmospheric flow, and then leveraging these processes to enable optimal performance. Traditional CFD-based approaches to model these processes with high-fidelity simulations are too expensive to embed on systems that often have limited computational and communication resources. As a result, the systems must be given the ability to learn these physical processes and then to act accordingly. Furthermore, learning and acting must occur in real time. We will verify these approaches through simulation, and potentially in limited experimentation.”

Ultimately, Gorodetsky hopes to use his YIP grant to develop a plug-and-play computational framework to enable reinforcement learning for autonomous systems in order to reduce the requirement of humans to participate in low-level decision making regarding how to execute a mission. With the objective of reducing human error, efficient computational mathematics approaches and algorithms can serve as a foundation of the brain of the autonomous system, and enable humans to concentrate on providing the high-level mission specifications.

Autonomous systems are widely regarded as a safer alternative to manned missions in war zones or in unpredictable environments. By improving the robustness of unmanned aerial systems, Gorodetsky’s research can help mitigate the need for dangerous manned missions, a key step in propelling the aerospace industry forward while protecting its pilots.

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MARTINS AND MANGANO WIN 2019 AIAA APPLIED AERODYNAMICS BEST PAPER AWARD

In January 2019, Joaquim Martins, professor, Aerospace Engineering, and master’s student Marco Mangano, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands, were awarded the 2019 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Applied Aerodynamics Best Paper at the 2019 AIAA SciTech Forum.

Their paper is titled “Multipoint Aerodynamic Shape Optimization for Subsonic and Supersonic Regimes.” Martins and Mangano are now working on another journal paper on the same topic and Mangano will be joining his group as a PhD student this fall.

Inspired by the Aerion Supersonic’s aircraft concept, the paper focuses on the automatic design optimization of business jets operating at both subsonic and supersonic speeds. Starting with 2D shape optimization, the team developed morphing wings that perform well in subsonic conditions (required over land due to noise regulations), and supersonic conditions (allowed over open water where noise is not as great of a concern). The paper also provided insight into the 3D effects of morphing wing design.

With a grant from Delft University of Technology, Mangano gave Martins an opportunity to work on supersonic aircraft for the first time since Martins’ 2002 PhD thesis. Mangano spent a year at U-M as a visiting student working on his master’s thesis under the supervision of Martins, who heads U-M’s Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Laboratory (MDO). This work benefited from the support of other MDO lab members, which made it possible for Mangano to quickly learn the tools he used in his work.

FACULTY RECEIVE NSF GRANT FOR UAS TRAFFIC RESEARCH

Principal Investigator Hossein Rastgoftar, assistant research scientist, Aerospace Engineering, and Co-Principal Investigator Ella Atkins, professor, Aerospace Engineering, are recipients of the new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for, “A Continuum Deformation Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Traffic Management.”

Rastgoftar and Atkins, together with aerospace graduate students, will develop mathematical foundations to safely and efficiently coordinate the unmanned aircraft systems’ (UAS) traffic envisioned to routinely fly above urban centers in this three-year project supported by the NSF Division

of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation. Per emerging UAS Traffic Management (UTM) standards, a dedicated transit airspace layer will assure UAS are separated from manned aircraft traffic, allowing UAS to focus on coordinating with each other.

The project is for a two-layer physics-based approach to route UAS as coordinated flow-through high-density airspace transit channels. At the top “macroscopic” coordination layer, UAS will be assigned to traffic channels based on their destinations and physical ability to coordinate flight paths with each other. At the “microscopic” coordination layer, the existing continuum deformation cooperative control strategy will be extended to allow large-scale UAS groups to efficiently follow routes that respect airspace channel geometrics backed by mathematical guarantees of collision avoidance.

The project also defines an interface between macroscopic and microscopic layers to deal with unpredicted events and UAS failure in a resilient fashion. The theoretical achievements of the project will be supported by large-scale simulations and flight experiments.


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JORNS AWARDED AFOSR YOUNG INVESTIGATOR PROGRAM AWARD FOR ELECTRIC THRUSTER RESEARCH

In 2018, Benjamin Jorns, assistant professor, Aerospace Engineering, received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award.

His award-winning proposal, “Predictive Modeling for Complex Plasma Systems with Poorly Understood Physics,” describes the need for additional research on electric thruster technologies such as Hall thrusters and field reversed configuration (FRC) thrusters.

As a form of propulsion with moderate specific impulse, Hall thrusters have been historically used for in-orbit satellite orientation adjustment

and for propulsion of robotic space vehicles. FRC thrusters are a much less developed technology but could have unprecedentedly high performance and power density compared to state-of-the-art electric thrusters.

Jorns explains that although Hall thrusters, which he studies as co-director of U-M’s Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory (PEPL), are a mature technology with quite a bit of flight heritage, there are no predictive models for either of these [Hall or FRC] thrusters. “You cannot program a new prototype geometry into CAD or a commercial code, run it and be confident that it will predict performance. This is because there are aspects of the fundamental physical processes in these devices that we do not understand sufficiently to model,” he explains. “Specifically, Hall thruster researchers do not have a strong understanding of how electrons move in the plasma. For FRC thrusters, a type of plasma ‘rail gun,’ there are many open and fundamental questions about how the propellant can be efficiently accelerated.”

As a YIP awardee, Jorns will receive a $450,000 research grant to be used

over a three-year period. With this funding, he and his team will develop and model technologies for United States Air Force applications. Jorns’ goal for Hall thrusters is to finish this work with algorithms that can be incorporated into existing Hall thruster codes and that actually demonstrate a predictive capability for mode transitions, performance and dynamical response.

For FRC thrusters, on the other hand, there is much more room for development than the more mature Hall thruster technology. Facing the challenge of building and optimizing an operational FRC thruster, Jorns said, “I would be very happy if [at the end of the contract] we actually had a working thruster with new insight into how they work and a demonstration of optimized performance.”

As a widely renowned laboratory for plasmadynamics research, the PEPL is undertaking a series of research efforts for a variety of applications. The lab is home to an extensive family of five- to six-kilowatt Hall thrusters, a series of micropropulsion concepts and a 100-kilowatt class, three-channel thruster design dubbed the X3.

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CESNIK NAMED CLARENCE L. “KELLY” JOHNSON COLLEGIATE PROFESSOR OF AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

In March 2019, Carlos Cesnik, director of the U-M Active Aeroelasticity and Structures Research Laboratory (A2SRL) assumed the new professorship title of Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering.

The namesake of the professorship is Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, the famed U-M aeronautical engineering alumnus who founded Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works and designed the SR-71 Blackbird, one of the fastest air-breathing aircraft on record.

In his 19-year career at U-M, Cesnik has served as A2SRL founder and director, and as director of the Airbus-U-M Center for Aero-Servo-Elasticity for Very Flexible Aircraft (2017–present). He is a leading researcher in nonlinear aeroelasticity, coupled aeroelasticity-flight dynamics of very flexible aircraft, aero-thermo-servo-elastic simulation of hypersonic vehicles, smart structures, structural mechanics and structural health monitoring, having published over 300 archival journal papers, conference papers and technical reports in those areas.

youtu.be/qQbUJaQ94x0

Cesnik was born and educated in Brazil. He earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (in 1987 and 1989, respectively). Cesnik earned a master of science degree in aerospace engineering and a PhD from the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (in 1991 and 1994, respectively).

He has also worked as a research engineer for Embraer, where he developed his experience in aeroelasticity, finite element modeling and structural and design optimization. Before joining the U-M, Cesnik was the Boeing assistant and associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also been a licensed pilot for over 35 years, flying many types of general aviation aircraft in addition to various ultra-light and homebuilt airplanes.

At U-M, Cesnik has been widely recognized for his leadership and research excellence. He is a fellow of both the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Royal Aeronautical Society. Cesnik’s recent awards include the Monroe-Brown Foundation Research Excellence Award, and the 2018 American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Boeing Best Paper Award for his publication, “Nonlinear Computational Aeroelasticity Using Structural Modal Coordinates.”

He will hold the Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering professorship until February 28, 2024. His predecessor was Daniel Inman, professor and former chair of Aerospace Engineering.

INMAN NAMED HARM BUNING COLLEGIATE PROFESSOR OF AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Daniel Inman was named the Harm Buning Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering through February 28, 2024. Inman has been with U-M since 2011, previously serving as the chair of Aerospace Engineering and the Clarence “Kelly” Johnson Professor.

As a collegiate professor, Inman has the opportunity to choose whose name his professorship will carry from those who were faculty or alumni of the department. He chose the late Professor Harm Buning, who began at U-M in 1956. Inman cites a 1974 presentation Buning gave as his inspiration for pursuing a career in aerospace engineering. “Not only was he an outstanding aerospace engineer with a tremendous influence on the early space program, but he touched me personally,” said Inman. “He also embedded in my mind that Michigan Aerospace was the best place in the world to work.”

During his nearly 40 years at U-M, Buning became an expert in astrodynamics and mission analysis, and developed a national reputation in spacecraft design.

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2018 –19 ANNUAL REPORT · 2019. 11. 22. · Foster a culture of innovation in education ... Tia Sutton (BSAE ‘00) has had a career dedicated to improving and protecting our environment