Category: News

Across Georgia Tech, researchers are exploring the universe — its origins, possible futures, and humanity and Earth’s place in it. These investigations are the efforts of hundreds of astrobiologists, astrophysicists, aerospace engineers, astronomers, and experts in space policy and science fiction — and all of this work is brought together under the Institute’s new Space Research Initiative (SRI).

The SRI is the hub of all things space-related at Georgia Tech. It connects research institutes, labs, facilities, Schools, and Colleges to foster the conversation about space across Georgia and beyond. As a budding Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI), the SRI currently encompasses three core centers that contribute distinct interdisciplinary perspectives to studying space.

To learn about all of the research centers supported by the SRI, and to read the full story, click here.

“Most space mission systems historically have used one spacecraft designed to complete an entire mission independently. Whether it was a weather satellite or a human-crewed module like Apollo, nearly every spacecraft was deployed and performed its one-off mission completely on its own.”

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A Georgia Tech alum has emerged after living in a simulated Mars habitat at the Johnson Space Center in Houston for the past year.

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Have you ever wondered how there can be ice on the moon? Nine-year-old Olaf from Hillsborough, North Carolina, asked Curious Kids this question, and members of Georgia Tech’s Space Research Initiative — Glenn Lightsey, Thomas Orlando, and Frances Rivera-Hernández — had the answer.

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Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Engineering and Sciences have been chosen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to hire a new faculty member focused on solar-terrestrial science and space weather research. The NSF is prioritizing a national need in geospace physics and selected Georgia Tech from a pool of national universities.

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April 12 is a significant date in the history of exploration, as it marks the first space flight of a human, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. This year on April 12, the Georgia Tech Space Research Initiative (Space RI) hosted an event highlighting the Institute’s interdisciplinary space research. The Yuri’s Day Symposium was Space RI’s first public event.

While hundreds of Georgia Tech students gathered on Tech Green on April 8 to witness the first eclipse in the United States in close to a decade, three Ph.D. students in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) began preparing for the eclipse days before. Roderick Gray, Matthew Strong, and Varun Rajput, along with ECE research engineer Kevin Whitmore, traveled early Saturday morning to Houston, Texas.

To see the historic event, 50 students from Georgia Tech’s Astronomy Club traveled to Missouri to view the solar eclipse on April 8. Read the full story to learn more.

Professor John Wise, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, joined Neil deGrasse Tyson on a panel of leading experts at the 25th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate. The discussion centered on how the James Webb Space Telescope has changed astrophysics. View the full story to read more!

The Georgia Institute of Technology has a long history in space research and exploration, from educating astronauts to developing and controlling spacecraft that can travel across the solar system.

Some Georgia Tech researchers solve cosmic mysteries such as how supermassive black holes were born — and others now are getting a better, sharper look at those black holes. There are investigators searching for the origins of life, and some leading multi-institutional projects exploring questions of  how life evolved and about the presence of water in the lunar environment to enable the return of human explorers for a sustained period.

And that barely gets us into orbit — there’s a lot of Georgia Tech in space. Much of the work is supported by longtime Georgia Tech partners like NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. But as space becomes more accessible, affordable, and necessary for commercial activity — and therefore more crowded — Tech is also developing expertise in space policy and business.

And now, plans are underway for the next big phase of Georgia Tech’s outer space mission with the launch of the Space Research Initiative (SRI) on campus. The SRI team will work to strengthen interdisciplinary relationships in space research at Georgia Tech, which will lead to creation of an Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI) by 2025.