Aerospace Corporation Collaboration

The Aerospace Corporation continues collaboration with Space@VT to bring new opporunities to faculty and students through mentoring major design experience projects in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. This collaboration has been fostered by Afroze Mohammad in Virginia Tech's Center for Economic and Community Engagement.  Read more

Cislunar Enterprise

Space@VT faculty members Scott Bailey, Jon Black, and Afroze Mohammed have joined Aerospace Corporation as well as VT's Innovation Campus, Purdue University, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in taking a leadership role in community planning for the rapidly expanding utilization of orbits out to the moon, the Cislunar Enterprise. So far this group has produced two white papers and held three Technology Exchange Meetings. They address technology challenges, the needed evolution in workforce training, and policy implications.  The white papers can be found at:  Enabling a Robust Ecosystem in Cislunar Space Leveraging Commerical Solutions , Enabling the Future Cislunar Space Enterprise Cislunar.

Virginia Tech Alumni in space featured by LINK+LICENSE+LAUNCH. See the next frontier of space priemer site for more videos from Virginia Tech alumni working in the space industry.

Aeronomy of ice

ECE researchers are engaged in further studies of middle atmosphere gravity waves in NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice (AIM) mission. New algorithms to determine stratospheric gravity wave morphology will be applied to more than 10 years of AIM observations to form a unique dataset for studying the coupling of the Earth’s upper and lower atmosphere.

Impacts of space-weather events on the ionosphere

ECE researchers will be conducting atmospheric gravity wave studies via in-situ measurements of wave perturbations in the ionosphere and remote sensing of the middle atmosphere. These measurements can then be correlated with weather maps of the lower atmosphere, allowing for atmospheric coupling studies over a wide altitude range.

Radiative impacts of pollutants

ECE researchers are developing new instrumentation to observe the radiative impacts of pollutants. The new instruments are compact, robust, and suitable for implementation on constellations of satellites.

Mapping polar ionospheric field-aligned currents

An ECE investigation examined how the currents flowing in and out of the ionosphere respond to the interplanetary electric field, the product of the solar wind velocity and Earth’s magnetic field. We found that the magnetic field-aligned currents have a linear response to the level of solar wind driving, which was surprising since the electric fields in the ionosphere have been known to level off, or saturate, as the interplanetary electric increases.