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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Masatoshi (Toshi) Hirabayashi, an associate professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, has been selected by NASA’s Hera Participating Scientist Program (HERA-PSP) to join the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera mission. Together, with an international consortium of 11 other scientists, Hirabayashi will perform a multi-faceted, detailed, post-impact study of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The DART mission was led by the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. 

The DART mission targeted the binary asteroid system where Dimorphos (the smaller secondary) orbits Didymos (the larger primary), to intentionally cause a spacecraft crash on Dimorphos. The collision, which occurred on September 26, 2022, was the first to demonstrate asteroid deflection by changing the asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact. Astronomers monitored this event using ground- and space-based telescopes like the Hubble Telescope (HST). A recent Nature article, “Ejecta, From the DART-Produced Active Asteroid Dimorphos,” on which Hirabayashi is a co-author, documented HST’s detailed observations of the intense dust ejection generated by the impact. 

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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!