Category: News

James Shin, an electrical engineering major from Hoschton, Georgia, has received a 2025 Marshall Scholarship. He will study physics at the University of Cambridge and public policy at the University of Oxford to advance engineering in space.

Shin has coupled his academic program, first, with research in the Space Systems Design Laboratory and the Dynamics and Control System Laboratory at Georgia Tech. He then became interested in extreme environment electronics through his research in Dr. Cressler’s Silicon-Germanium Devices Lab. His expertise in resilient technology earned him coveted internships at Blue Origin and SpaceX, where he was a 2024 Matthew Isakowitz Fellow.

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From deserts in Arizona to salty lakes in Canada, these environments give scientists an idea of what Mars and Jupiter’s moons might be like.

The surface is covered with fine ash. The lava fields stretch for miles, punctuated only by basalt mountains. But life could be found here if you look hard enough.

This barren land isn’t Mars or Pluto, but volcanic deserts in Iceland. The environment is so comparable to Mars’ arid landscape that researchers can use it as an analog. From Earth, they can extrapolate how planets in our galaxy and beyond could sustain life and what tools humans might need to make homes on these planets.

Georgia Tech researchers explore everywhere from Oregon’s mountaintops to Arizona’s deserts to better understand space — and life on this planet.

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Graduate student Lillian Tso, ME 2023, was selected as an analog astronaut for the Asclepios IV mission, a training exercise that simulated a space crew deployed to the moon.

The Asclepios project is a program of analog missions designed by students for students under the mentorship of trained professionals, which began in 2019.

The two-week exercise occurred earlier this year at the Sasso San Gottardo Museum in Switzerland, a decommissioned war fortress near the Gotthard Pass, where the crew remained underground for the entire exercise simulating life at the lunar South Pole.

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Team All Hands on Dec is on a mission to uncover the mysteries of the moon. The team won $1,000 and the top honors for Best Aerospace Engineering (AE) project at Georgia Tech’s Fall 2024 Capstone Design Expo held in the McCamish Pavilion on December 2.

Altogether, 107 student-led teams from nine schools and three colleges showcased their design projects to 120 judges and crowds of onlookers. 

All Hands on Dec team members Lauren Forcey, Frank Frazier, Daniel Gilliland, Bryce Laderoute, Schuyler McCaa, and Sayed Tabatabaei were among eight aerospace teams vying for the best AE project.

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The School of Physics will launch the new B.S. in Astrophysics program in summer 2025. This new major is the latest addition to the College of Sciences’ academic offerings and responds to increased student demand for courses and research opportunities in astrophysics. A minor in astrophysics will also be offered starting next summer.

According to David Ballantyne, associate chair for Academic Programs and professor in the School of Physics, the new major is unique because it focuses on the future of astronomy and astrophysics, especially in the era of discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

“We made a concerted effort when crafting this degree to make it modern and forward-facing,” says Ballantyne. “It is very much focused on the next decade of astronomy and astrophysics, providing a strong emphasis on computational skills, data analysis, and big data.”

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In 2017, a long, oddly shaped asteroid passed by Earth. Called ‘Oumuamua, it was the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, but it wasn’t an isolated incident — less than two years later, in 2019, a second interstellar object (ISO) was discovered. 

“‘Oumuamua was found passing just 15 million miles from Earth — that’s much closer than Mars or Venus,” says James Wray. “But it was formed in an entirely different solar system. Studying these objects could give us incredible insight into extrasolar planets, and how our planet fits into the universe.”

Wray, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, has just been awarded a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship to do just that. Pivot Fellowships are among the most prestigious sources of funding for cutting-edge research, and support leading researchers who have the deep interest, curiosity and drive to make contributions to a new discipline.

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Abstract: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are an important facet of global connectivity providing high speed Internet, cellular, IoT connectivity and so on. Combined with the rich resource availability on each satellite, LEO satellites represent a new, emerging cloud frontier – the LEO Compute Cloud. However, satellite mobility introduces non-trivial challenges when orchestrating applications for a LEO compute cloud, making it harder to deploy applications without increasing the latency and bandwidth costs. In this paper, we identify the concrete challenges in using state-of-the-art terrestrial orchestrators for a LEO compute cloud. We present Krios – a LEO compute cloud orchestration system that hides the complexities introduced by satellite mobility and enables a practical LEO compute cloud. The design of Krios is centered around a novel LEO zones abstraction that allows application providers to specify where their applications should be available. Krios provides crucial system support to enable the LEO zones abstraction, ensuring uninterrupted availability of applications in LEO zones via proactive and predictive application handovers. Our experimental evaluation of Krios with representative applications demonstrates a practical and efficient LEO compute cloud, without requiring any disruptive changes in applications and with modest system overheads. With Krios, LEO orchestration requires just ~1 application instance at a time to maintain the same availability as what prior work achieves by deploying application instances on all satellites or by performing 6-10 times more frequent expensive handovers.

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Jud Ready always wanted to be an astronaut.

“From first grade forward, that’s what I planned to do,” said Ready, principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and adjunct professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. “While studying engineering in college, I realized I didn’t want to build the spaceship. I wanted to work inside the spaceship.”

Glenn Lightsey, interim director of Georgia Tech’s Space Research Initiative, had similar aspirations. Both men tried to follow their dreams to the stars. But life presented them with alternative plans.

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The comet made a close approach to Earth around Halloween, offering a rare and spectacular celestial event.

Read the article by Dr. James Wray, Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology here.