Category: News

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!

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.

Georgia Tech now owns an interplanetary “Ramblin’ Wreck”  — a briefcase-sized spacecraft orbiting the sun, capping a student-led mission in the cosmos.

Right now, approximately 3.7 million miles from Earth, a small spacecraft the size of a briefcase is racing away from the planet by about 40,000 miles every day. And each day, sometimes twice, a team of 10 Georgia Tech undergraduate students communicate with it to monitor its health, respond to anomalies, and use its instruments for scientific studies.

Not only are they controlling the sun-circling satellite, but they also own it. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California has given Lunar Flashlight to Georgia Tech, making it the only higher education institution in full control of an interplanetary spacecraft. The designation is typically reserved for NASA or foreign governments.

“It’s really crazy. I didn’t imagine as an undergraduate that I would be talking to a satellite, let alone leading a team of 10 of my peers,” said Micah Pledger, an aerospace engineering student serving as missions operations lead. “Our team learns so much every day.”