Texas A&M University--College Station, College Station, TX

When operating in space – power is where it all begins. Without power your spacecraft may as well be a lump of coal. Making electricity in space is most often accomplished through installation of solar cells used to charge batteries, and as any spacecraft engineer will tell you – there’s never enough power no matter how effective it is produced.

At Texas A&M’s Center for Space Power students and faculty know that improvements in power storage technology lets you bring the same power capacity with less launch weight. If power is where it begins, then launch weight is where it ends, because a space vehicle that weighs too much isn’t going anywhere.

Texas A&M has a number of energy-storage projects underway including improvements to Lithium Ion batteries. Beyond this, spinning flywheels are a potential quantum leap – with the ability to store ten times as much power as the best batteries with the same amount of launch payload weight. Flywheel storage aboard a spacecraft presents the potential for significant improvements compared with batteries – but keeping them working reliably has been a challenge. The critical breakthrough is Texas A&M’s development of a magnetic bearing which lets the flywheel spin between two magnets allowing very high speeds with almost no mechanical wear at all.

Making power is a second area of research at Texas A&M. Sunlight is by far the most common power source for space missions – but heat is a close second choice – most often derived from the radioactive decay of plutonium. This type of heat transfer is most often used on space missions flying too far from the Sun for solar power. Extra heat from computers and other electronics is often dumped overboard with radiators pointing towards the blackness of space and converting it to useful power instead can be a big win.

At the Center for Space Power researchers are working with the special properties of sodium to convert some of this waste heat back to useful electricity with devices that work at lower temperatures. Laboratory tests have already achieved efficiencies as high as 19% and design studies have shown that efficiencies as high as 30% are achievable in the near term – and likely even better with further research.

Power may seem like an ordinary commodity in space – but if your power system can produce and store twice the total energy – your radio can be that much more powerful – letting you send home twice as much science data from across the solar system.

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

The solar system is awash in gravitational warfare. Planetary and solar gravity duke it out for the rights to control – and if possible – swallow passing objects. Sometimes these forces fight to a stalemate, leaving gravity in a demilitarized zone where objects can linger in stable orbits far from trouble.

Astrophysicist Richard Gott of Princeton University knows all about this effect. First postulated by Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1772 – this was confirmed more recently by the discovery Achilles – an asteroid orbiting 200 million miles ahead of Jupiter.

Five stable ‘Lagrange’ points are associated with every major planet. For Earth one of these is behind us deeper into space a million miles farther from the Sun. Another is located a million miles closer in between us and the Sun. A third region is found directly on the other side of the Sun – right where we’ll be in six months. And the remaining two are 60 degrees ahead and behind – known as L4 and L5.

Dr. Gott suspects that small asteroids may be trapped at Earth’s L4 and L5 Lagrange points – an idea he sees as both intriguing and alarming. An asteroid in these orbits could provide valuable minerals easily delivered to Earth with almost no rocket power. Yet the ease of delivery also convinces Dr. Gott that usual gravitational forces from a passing planet may one day destabilize asteroids in these orbits sending one on a collision-course with Earth. "If we see something big in there, it would be like a ticking time bomb," says Gott, and “the best thing might be to deal with it preemptively” – rather than waiting for trouble.

More than 2000 asteroids are known to be dancing at Lagrange points associated with Jupiter – though none have been found in concert with the Earth. Glare from the Sun leaves few opportunities to search using ground-based telescopes, and at the urging of Dr. Gott and others, NASA is now watching with sun-observing spacecraft already in the vicinity.

Whether L4 and L5 asteroids will be found chasing and trailing the Earth is anyone’s guess. Though either way – it would be nice to know.

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Imagine a job where you travel along the surface of another planet making scientific observations and discoveries. You drive down into monster craters peering at layers of alien bedrock and across small mountains granting breath-taking vistas of a world never visited by any astronaut.

This isn’t science fiction. It happens almost every day at Cornell University where NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Cornell’s’ Mars rover team manage and operate the twin robots Spirit and Opportunity.

“These robots are our surrogates,” says Steven Squyres, professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover program, “We experience Mars through their eyes.” And with thousands of images assembled into breath-taking panoramas, it’s hard to argue with that.

A round-trip radio signal to Mars averages 30 minutes, so driving a rover on Mars is more like playing an online video game using email messages. Managing robots by remote control from millions of miles away can almost feel routine at times – except on those days when a rover drives into an unforeseen sand trap while racing on a life-and-death mission to keep its solar panels pointed sunward for the winter.

Spirit and Opportunity may still be operating once the next generations of rovers arrive in two years. Meanwhile, Opportunity is on a two year trek to Endeavour Crater – a feature 20 times the diameter of the largest crater explored to date – while Spirit continues to explore the Columbia Hills on the other side of the planet.

When will these missions end? “They have no off button,” says Dr. Squyres. “If we’d built them with an ‘off’ switch there was always a chance we might hit that switch by accident.”

Down the road in 2011 NASA plans to launch the Mars Science Laboratory – a colossal nuclear powered machine dwarfing previous rover missions. Cornell has built advanced cameras and science instruments for this mission and, once on the surface, they are expecting research opportunities and exploration for years to come.

University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

Dr. Victoria Coverstone directs the Computational Astrodynamic Research Lab at UIUC with a focus on the control of spacecraft in flight – especially ways to navigate and travel throughout the solar system using ultra low-power thrusters burning for weeks and months at a time.

Certain kinds of low power electric-powered thrusters far outperform convention rocket engines, yet must run much longer to create the same amount of acceleration. Traditional space navigation maneuvers happen in minutes and are relatively easy to calculate. Thrusters running for months at a time change speed gradually and maneuvers of this type require special software and lots of creative imagination to predict results. For Dr. Coverstone it’s been worth the effort, yielding novel ways to reach places that would be impractical using convention rocket fueled engines requiring far more fuel.

Complimenting Dr. Coverstone's research is Dr. Rodney Burton, Professor of Aerospace Engineering. Dr. Burton’s team develops electric hypervelocity accelerators, otherwise known as electric propulsion. These sorts of thrusters include a wide category of methods deriving most of their energy from electric power. On a smaller end, research focuses on thrusters using high-voltage pulses to vaporize materials like Teflon in small quantities. Teflon thrusters are most often used to stabilize the position of communication satellites like those used for TV signals – keeping them broadcasting in the right direction.

A larger project under Dr. Burton’s direction involves exotic ion thrusters where solar panel electricity is used to strip away the electrons of inert gasses like Xenon. Once super-heated and in a hurry to go somewhere – these ionized gas jets shoot away at velocities many times faster than conventional chemical rocket thrusters – which means far more power with far less fuel.

With the development of a gallium thruster planned for NASA's Jupiter mission, engineers at the University of Illinois are looking to a not-too-distant future when electric thrusters powered by nuclear energy may soon travel far beyond the solar system – flying fast enough to reach nearby stars.

University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI

In the Hollywood Universe, complicated spacecraft configurations are the norm. All sorts of pods and structures extend in every direction. Large vehicles come apart and dock back together as easy as Lego blocks. Navigation and control is as easy as saying ‘engage.’

The real Universe isn’t so kind. An engine must align with the central weight of your ship and direct its thrust while keeping the shape of your spacecraft in mind – or else spin you around in circles. As modules are attached and removed even simple maneuvers, like pointed to the left or right, may have your ship pointing down or up instead – and pretty soon you’re not going anywhere in a hurry.

At the University of Michigan, Professor N. Harris McClamroch knows all about this problem. Working with his team at the Attitude Dynamics and Control Laboratory, Dr. McClamroch studies ways to maneuver complex vehicles in a zero-gravity environment.

It turns out that there’s no such thing as zero-gravity. Space is full of microgravity pulling on your spacecraft from all sorts of directions. Nearby planets are lumpy and slightly flatted – much like a water balloon stretched out when spun. Planets gyrate and wobble, and even if gravity were perfectly smooth, the force is always different wherever you go – pulling at one end your spaceship harder than the other. Left to drift, every object in space begins to tumble, and working against this requires a plan geared towards fuel savings and ways to limit wear and tear on thrusters and gyroscopes used for control.

Missions like the Hubble Space Telescope and the GPS constellation of satellites need to hold their orientations – maintaining what space scientists call attitude control. Just like all resources that require power and fuel, attitude control is a resource that runs out eventually, and doing more with less will extend the life of your mission.

In the jargon of the aerospace community, scientists laboring at the Attitude Dynamics and Control Laboratory are ‘working the problem’ – so future missions won’t need to work so hard to maintain control – saving money in the long run and making access to space less expensive in the future.

Purdue University--West Lafayette, West Lafayette, IN

It is possible to travel throughout the solar system by simply heading in the right direction at the right time and with the right amount of initial velocity. The same can be said for a bus driver – except that in space no maps exist and the roads are constantly changing as planets move around. You know that fuel is one resource that will run out. So the best bus route – or space route – attempts to coast along as much as possible.

Much of the work of Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics is focused on this sort of spaceflight fuel-savings – mapping routes through the solar passing places of interest without excessive rocket-powered course-changing along the way.

Dr. Kathleen Howell studies the gravitational affects of several planetary bodies interacting all at once. This is the hard part of space navigation. Two bodies in space interact with movements that are easily calculated. Add a third or a forth body and the web of gravity becomes so complex that results must be simulated using powerful computers. Since the time of Isaac Newton this has been solved by breaking the big problem into smaller problems. By knowing where everything is going and how much force each body is exerting and feeling, we can ask our computer what will happen during the next millisecond. Then do this again and again – adding the milliseconds end-to-end until a we can see where things wind up in a few minutes, days and even years.

Gravitational eddies and currents swirl into complex shapes moving in hard to image directions, and even when the gravitational shape of this environment is known, navigating a spacecraft through complicated regions must be done with considerable care and planning.

At Perdue, Dr. James Longuski sees advantages in the apparent chaos. If you’d like to wander among the moons of a major planet with almost no fuel – finding your way through the eddy currents can solve the problem without costly maneuvers.

Based on Dr.Howell’s work, Dr. Longuski designs complex trajectories for spacecraft missions. Instead of getting there in a hurry and jetting around like a honeybee, he sees trajectory design more a like a bottle with message tossed into the swirling sea at exactly the right moment. As long as he knows how the sea will change, he knows that the bottle will pass every destination along the way – all the way to the end of the mission.

In the years and centuries ahead, more powerful rockets and other propulsion methods will be possible. Yet getting free mileage from a well-designed trajectory is a goal unlikely to ever vanish.

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Larger graduate programs like Georgia Tech’s Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering often pull the whole spacecraft engineering picture under a single umbrella called systems engineering. The integration of electronics, mechanics, propulsion, and communications are just a few of the pieces of systems engineering and design – much like how a doctor must prescribe medications that work well together without interacting to cause unforeseen problems.

Trade-offs for subsystems such as power and battery size are typically handled by the more seasoned staff engineers on a program. Yet even they can find themselves stymied by complexity and can feel uncertain about the quality of their decisions. With a larger antenna design, perhaps a radio could be smaller – requiring less power and fewer solar cells. Or by using electric propulsion, the power system might need to grow. But beyond a few simple choices, the picture can become too muddy to resolve, and with high cost of spaceflight – guesswork is hardly the answer.

At the School of Aerospace Engineering researchers study ways to simplify these sorts of decisions through a structured approach based on lessons learned from the past. By developing tools much like reference guides available to prescribing physicians they can flag problems and maintain a balance of useful possibilities as options are considered.

All space missions compete for scarce funding. This is nothing new. Yet those missions offering greater capability with better use of resources will be the ones more likely funded and flown in the years ahead. And just like physicians navigating the complex world of prescription medications – making better decisions will always be the healthiest choice for all parties involved.

Stanford University, Stanford, CA

One of the world’s most ambitious space programs of all time is geared toward measuring important properties of Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Every motion in space is governed by General Relativity and in 1959 – at the dawn of spaceflight – a mission called Gravity Probe B (or GP-B) was commissioned by NASA and Stanford University to test two properties of Relativity that can only be measured in space.

Imagine a Universe where celestial bodies are never drawn to each other by gravity – yet somehow they come together anyway.

Welcome to Albert Einstein’s Universe.

It seems that gravity acts more like a bowling ball sitting in the middle of a trampoline. The heavy ball does not attract smaller balls rolling nearby. It has simply creates a low point in the fabric of the trampoline – and the other balls are more than happy to roll downhill.

Einstein’s equations show that space is likewise a fabric of sorts – a three dimensional fabric distorted by the heavy stars and planets of the Universe – including the Earth. Smaller objects drifting nearby are not actually attracted by the Earth. Instead they are headed for a low point in space created by the Earth.

Since 1959 the Gravity Probe B project continues to be a training ground. Nearly a hundred doctoral students at Stanford and other universities have learned their space science working on GP-B, as well as a dozen seeking master's degrees, hundreds of undergraduates and of high school students. In the process critical spacecraft technologies had to be invented, and though not the original point of the GP-B mission, many of the most exciting missions throughout the history of spaceflight would not have been possible without technology developed for GP-B.

Recently – fully 45 years after it was first conceived – Gravity Probe B was finally launched carrying two specific goals in mind – first to see if the spinning Earth twists or ‘drags’ the fabric of space – and also, if space-time distortions near a planet will make orbiting object line up with the shape of the distorted fabric.

Today researchers from Stanford’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in concert with researchers from around the world are sifting through Terabytes of data returned by GP-B. Already they have demonstrated the dragging effect and are growing tantalizing close to the second goal.

Both as a space experiment and design project, Gravity Probe B shows how persistence matters. For many years to come – as one of the great catalysts for spacecraft development – the work surrounding GP-B will remain a source of technological prowess to those facing the toughest spacecraft engineering challenges ahead.

California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

In the area of spaceflight reliability and safety, researchers at Caltech have your back covered. Among many areas for research, scientists at Caltech are studying ways to make structures stronger – yet with less launch weight. They are also finding ways to cram more atop your launch vehicle – much like how a transformer toy is collapsed for shelf display, only to be unfolded later.

How hard could that be?

As it turns out surviving a space launch is a lot like surviving a train wreck – not so hard with lots of planning – yet impossible without a basic understanding of materials and how they perform under extreme conditions.

Space is an unforgiving environment, and once neatly unfolded and flying free, our battle has just begun. Temperatures can vary hundreds of degrees – cold enough on the shadow-side of your spaceship to make dry ice and hot enough on the sunny side to boil water. And that is just the beginning. Micrometeoroids and high-velocity dust left over from the early solar system can collide on a regular basis – and the outer skin of your craft must absorb and diffuse these impacts – yet remain lightweight for launch.

This is just a glimpse at the work at Caltech. Other projects include ways to avoid explosions during rocket-powered flight maneuvers. They are also working on ways to prevent contamination from the Earth reaching another planet – or from vehicles returning home. Other labs are focused on materials that can change shape with the push of a button, and they are also developing microscopic robots to sense and maintain spacecraft’s health and performance.

Working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech designs and builds science missions flown throughout the solar system and beyond – including the current crop of Mars rover vehicles which had to survive launch, months in space, then land and operate in the face of Martian dust storms and other perils.

So the next time you’re strapped atop a launch vehicle readying for the unforgiving environments beyond the blue sky of terra ferma  – you’ll have a lot of people at Caltech to thank for the reliably of your ship once you’ve landed safely back home on solid ground.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

For six months you’ve been floating across the solar system to reach Mars – avoiding the hazards of deep space to settle onto the surface of this new world ready to take up residence and explore every place you can reach.

Now what?

Mars has hardly any air. If you were an Apollo astronaut you might spend an hour or two prying yourself into and out of some vintage NASA spacesuit nearly twice your own weigh – which can work for a few days – but not working for months on Mars.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology already know that astronauts and space adventures of the future will need a better set of cloths – and MIT’s Dana Newman is already hard at work readying the next generation of space suits just for you.

As early as the 1830s ocean divers wore heavy underwater outfits with brass helmets pressurized with compressed air. These suits were replaced decades ago by the aqua lung, yet we’ve stuck to the same basic principal for spacesuits—astronauts living inside a bag pumped full of air.

The MIT solution is more like a sleek superhero outfit than a bulky hazmat suit. According to Dr. Newman, spacesuits filed with pressurized air work to keep their shape like an over-inflated balloon and spacewalking astronauts use as much as 70 to 80 percent of their total effort simply working against the shape of this balloon.

To address this annoying bit of physics, the idea of a "space activity suit" has been discussed for decades. Instead of inflating the whole balloon, a small pressurized air section would let an astronaut breathe, with the rest of the suit simply wrapped around your arms and legs using materials that press  against your skin with no need for compressed air. Until recently this was just an idea until materials technology and some cleaver thinking has made this possible.

Dr. Newman’s team calls their solution the BioSuit – a stylish outfit made from spandex reinforced with durable layers and external ribbing – in many ways resembling an alpine racer’s outfit – but with a lot more to worry about. Beyond improved mobility, small holes and rips in a BioSuit could be wrapped temporally with tape – which sure beats the old-style NASA airbag suit where astronauts would lose all breathable air in a matter of minutes.

On more than one occasion Dr. Newman has been seen around campus testing her latest model. By her estimates she sees the BioSuit ready for use within ten years – just in time for astronaut’s return to the Moon and preparations for missions to Mars.

Perhaps in the years ahead – if you happen see an Olympic bobsled racer or downhill skier exiting a space vehicle – you may seeing your first BioSuit in action. 

Top 10 Aerospace Graduate Schools in the Country as ranked by U.S. News & World Report (www.usnews.com):

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2. California Institute of Technology

3. Stanford University

4. Georgia Institute of Technology

5. Purdue University—West Lafayette

6. University of Michigan—Ann Arbor

7. University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign

8. Cornell University

9. Princeton University

10. Texas A&M University—College Station