Aerospace

By Kayla Wiles   For astronauts to go on long missions to the moon or Mars, they need a refrigerator. But today’s fridges aren’t designed to work in zero gravity – or upside down if oriented that way when a spacecraft lands on another planet. A team of engineers from Purdue University, Air Squared, and…

By John Toon, Georgia Institute of Technology Many parcel delivery drones of the future are expected to handle packages weighing five pounds or less, a restriction that would allow small, standardized UAVs to handle a large percentage of the deliveries now done by ground vehicles. But will that relegate heavier packages to slower delivery by…

For low-cost small satellites to tackle emerging commercial, scientific and national security missions they need to be capable of maneuvering while still being compatible with rideshare. To responsibly manage our ever more crowded orbit zones into the future, all satellites will soon be required to de-orbit at end-of-life and avoid collisions with space debris at…

By Kayla Wiles In 2018, passengers onboard a flight to Australia experienced a terrifying 10-second nosedive when a vortex trailing their plane crossed into the wake of another flight. The collision of these vortices, the airline suspected, created violent turbulence that led to a free fall. To help design aircraft that can better maneuver in…

OrganiCam, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, is a lightweight, portable payload that is radiation-hardened and robust for space applications, opening exciting frontiers in space exploration and the search for signs of life beyond the Earth. OrganiCam will be a reconnaissance instrument for organics on other bodies of the solar system. These include ocean worlds, caves…

Low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites generate huge amounts of data daily and getting this data back to Earth in a timely, error-free manner is currently challenging and costly. MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) technology revolutionizes what is possible in this area. TBIRD technology enables dramatic increases in the achievable data volume delivered from LEO to…

Southwest Research Institute has received a four-year, $7,239,342 contract from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to develop air taxi technology to test the design capabilities of artificial intelligence-augmented design systems. The project is part of DARPA’s Symbiotic Design for Cyber Physical Systems program. Air taxis are short-range electric aircraft…

Dartmouth Engineering Professor Zi Chen has received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), to lead a three-year research project on the International Space Station (ISS). Chen’s proposal was one of just three selected from institutions across the country as…

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy established LaserNetUS, a network of facilities operating ultrapowerful lasers. Organized and funded through DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES), the new network was created to provide vastly improved access to unique lasers for researchers, and to help restore the U.S.’s once-dominant position in high-intensity laser research. Now,…

The U.S. Air Force awarded Southwest Research Institute a $12 million contract to redesign a critical B-1B Lancer system to help extend the aircraft’s service life. The B-1B is a long-range, supersonic bomber, which has served the Air Force since 1986. SwRI engineers will redesign the aircraft’s Fuel Center of Gravity Management System (FCGMS), which…

Crews at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken the first 3,200-megapixel digital photos – the largest ever taken in a single shot – with an extraordinary array of imaging sensors that will become the heart and soul of the future camera of Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The images are so large that…

A Southwest Research Institute proposal to study the Sun’s poles — considered among the last unexplored regions of the solar system — is one of five science investigations selected as a possible future NASA mission. Dr. Don Hassler, a program director at SwRI, is the principal investigator for Solaris. This proposed solar polar Medium-Class Explorers…

Aerospace and defense R&D The commercial airline industry — both suppliers and operators — has been one of the hardest hit industries by the COVID-19 pandemic and is likely to be one of the longest affected industries as well. Boeing, Airbus and General Electric have seen their business models go from years-long production backlogs to…

By Kayla Wiles A rocket is going up into space with a drag sail. The goal? For the drag sail to bring the rocket back to Earth, preventing it from becoming like the thousands of pieces of space junk in Earth’s lower orbit. The drag sail, developed by Purdue University engineers, will be on board…

Researchers from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) are working to develop unobtrusive diagnostics for hypersonic flight testing. The project led by Dr. Nicholas J. Mueschke of SwRI’s Mechanical Engineering Division and Dr. Christopher Combs of UTSA’s College of Engineering is supported by a $125,000 grant from the…

By Steve Tally When the NASA Mars rover Perseverance launches in the next few weeks, it will travel to Jezero Crater, which preserves evidence of a time when rivers flowed on Mars. The mission will take the next leap in space science by searching for signs of past life on the Red Planet. Not the…

A joint NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) team has awarded Southwest Research Institute a contract to develop the Solar Wind Plasma Sensor (SWiPS) for a satellite mission dedicated to tracking space weather. SWiPS will measure the properties of solar wind ions originating from the Sun, including the very fast ions associated with coronal mass…

Establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon, preparing for crewed missions to Mars, exploring the cosmos, and innovating how society travels by air requires new technologies and software. Each year, through its Inventions and Contributions Board, NASA recognizes the efforts of its engineers, software developers and collaborative partners by awarding Invention of the Year and…

NASA has awarded Southwest Research Institute $3 million to develop a lunar version of its Laser Absorption Spectrometer for Volatiles and Evolved Gas (LASVEGAS) instrument. This spectrometer can precisely measure the volatile compounds present in planetary atmospheres and surfaces — critical information for space science and exploration. “LASVEGAS is about half the size of a…

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently awarded Southwest Research Institute a $12,862,664 contract to develop a magnetometer for a satellite mission dedicated to tracking space weather. The magnetometer is part of the satellite’s solar wind instrument suite, which measures the characteristics of the solar wind plasma that interact with the Earth’s…

Feature Story Glenn Roberts Jr. It’s one thing to design, assemble, and install a next-generation telescope instrument. It’s another to bring it to life. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), installed on the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, contains more than half a million parts in one of its central…

Since its debut in 2010, the Next-generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) has rapidly become the largest gathering of suborbital researchers and educators in the world, providing an invaluable forum for information, discussion, coordination and networking in this community. NSRC-2020, to be held at the Omni Interlocken hotel in Broomfield, CO, March 2-4, will bring together…

An ultraviolet spectrograph (UVS) designed and built by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is the first scientific instrument to be delivered for integration onto the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft. Scheduled to launch in 2022 and arrive at Jupiter in 2030, JUICE will spend at least three years making detailed observations in…

The National Aeronautic Association announced today that work being done by the Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Lone Star UAS Center of Excellence & Innovation and NASA is among nine aviation and space achievements that will compete for the 2019 Robert J. Collier Trophy for excellence in aeronautics and astronautics in America. “We were flattered when…

A modern airplane’s fuselage is made from multiple sheets of different composite materials, like so many layers in a phyllo-dough pastry. Once these layers are stacked and molded into the shape of a fuselage, the structures are wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens and autoclaves, where the layers fuse together to form a resilient, aerodynamic shell. Now…