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  • SSDL Professor Álvaro Romero-Calvo Receives NIAC Grant

    Dr. Romero-Calvo has received NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) award for his research on improved electrolysis using magnetohydrodynamics. The concept that he and his team are working on will allow the efficient and reliable creation of oxygen and hydrogen gas in microgravity with up to 50% mass savings compared to current technologies. The NIAC award will fund further research and exploration of the topic.

  • SSDL Student Wins Best Small Satellite Student Paper

    Sam Hart was awarded Best Small Satellite Student Paper at the 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum for his paper, "Leveraging Phase Change for CubeSat Propellant Positioning." His doctoral research focuses on developing new methods of propellant management for small spacecraft. This work is advised by Professors Glenn Lightsey and Álvaro Romero-Calvo.

  • The proud LF team.
    End of Operations for Lunar Flashlight

    After over a year of operations, the Lunar Flashlight mission has now ended. As the spacecraft is leaving the Earth-Moon system, communications are no longer feasible. The tremendously hard work of the Georgia Tech and JPL teams led to a mission that is considered a success by all involved. Despite the off-nominal trajectory and anomalies in the propulsion system performance, a large amount of scientific data was collected. This data will be used to further optical navigation research being conducted in the SSDL.

  • SSDL Student Receive Prestigious NSTGRO Fellowship

    SSDL Ph.D. student Logan Feld from Dr Koki Ho's group received the NSTGRO Fellowship.

    His research will look into the impact of various control systems (thrusters, solar radiation pressure, multi-spacecraft) on overcoming gravitational and geometric uncertainties around small bodies such as asteroids and comets, with the goal of minimizing the amount of control necessary. The simulated spacecraft will be a mothership-daughtership configuration that will utilize as little control as possible to land the daughtership on the small body surface with varying amounts of uncertainty. 

  • Lunar Flashlight Launches

    In the early morning hours of December 11th, the Lunar Flashlight spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral. This 6U CubeSat will survey the lunar south pole for water ice. Lunar Flashlight was integrated and will now be operated by the SSDL! Additionally, the green monopropellant propulsion system used to inject the spacecraft into its lunar orbit was developed by members of the SSDL. Congratulations to all of those involved!