The first-ever UC Davis branch of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space kicks off its first year by submitting innovations like an inflatable emergency habitat and fuel recovery technology to NASA challenges.
With the recent uptick in private spaceflight companies launching commercial flights into suborbital space, and NASA's Artemis program that aims to land people on the Moon in 2024, new assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Rich Whittle believes we are on the cusp of a new era of human spaceflight.
Nine mechanical and aerospace engineering students from two research teams at UC Davis experienced zero gravity this December as they successfully tested two spaceflight technologies aboard two parabolic flights.
The Main Theatre at Wright Hall became the unlikely site of an experiment. Students in the Center for Spaceflight Research at UC Davis are working on technologies for a class of satellites that could inspect other spacecraft. In space, the light is harshly bright with no atmosphere to attenuate the sunshine, and the technology must be configured for that environment.
Researchers at the College of Engineering have developed a transgenic, or genetically modified, lettuce producing a drug to protect against bone density loss in microgravity.
When NASA's Perseverence rover approached Mars on February 18, 2021, UC Davis mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) alumna Jessica Samuels ’99 and Sara Langberg ’16 watched particularly closely to see their hard work pay off. Perseverance, the largest and most advanced Mars rover to date, will explore the existence of water, launch history’s first extraterrestrial helicopter and serve as the first leg of a mission to collect Martian rock and soil samples and bring them to Earth.
Through the new UC Davis Center for Neuroengineering and Medicine and projects funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) faculty members Sanjay Joshi, Jonathon Schofield and Steve Robinson are pushing the boundaries of the developing field of neuroengineering and finding new ways for humans and machines to work together.
A new interdisciplinary engineering design team is setting its sights on Mars. RoveCrest brings together engineering students with backgrounds in artificial intelligence, programming, robotics and biology to design and prototype a Mars rover. Their goal is to compete in the Mars Society’s 2020 University Rover Challenge, held in annually at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.
If space is the final frontier, UC Davis is taking giant leaps to reach it. With expertise in human-machine cooperation, control systems and materials under extreme conditions, the university aims to make itself a rising star in space engineering and play a crucial role in the next generation of space exploration.
