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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Future Leaders in Aerospace prepares the next...
MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) recently hosted the 2023 Future Leaders in Aerospace Symposium, inviting women and underrepresented minorities in aerospace fields to campus for a two-day program. The symposium was open to applications from recent graduates and students within one to two years of earning their PhD, with the goal of helping early-career academics to launch and navigate an academic career in aerospace engineering. Hosted annually, the event’s co-sponsors included ​​the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics...

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Dennis Whyte steps down as director of...
Dennis Whyte, who spearheaded the development of the world’s most powerful fusion electromagnet and grew the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s research volume by more than 50 percent, has announced he will be stepping down as the center’s director at the end of the year in order to devote his full attention to teaching, engaging in cutting-edge fusion research, and pursuing entrepreneurial activities at the PSFC. “The reason I came to MIT as a faculty member in ’06...

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Professor Emeritus Willard R. Johnson, political scientist...
Willard R. Johnson, a professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Political Science who focused his scholarly research on the political development of Africa, died in late October at age 87. Johnson served as a member of the MIT faculty for nearly 60 years, while also founding and participating in numerous civic initiatives aimed at making political and social advances in Africa and the U.S., and building engagement between the two regions. Johnson joined the political science faculty in...

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This 3D printer can watch itself fabricate...
With 3D inkjet printing systems, engineers can fabricate hybrid structures that have soft and rigid components, like robotic grippers that are strong enough to grasp heavy objects but soft enough to interact safely with humans. These multimaterial 3D printing systems utilize thousands of nozzles to deposit tiny droplets of resin, which are smoothed with a scraper or roller and cured with UV light. But the smoothing process could squish or smear resins that cure slowly, limiting the types of...

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Materials science and engineering career fair connects...
Students in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) got to mingle with potential employers interested in their specific skills this fall when the department held its first DMSE Career Fair. More than 20 companies, organizations, and laboratories set up booths in Walker Memorial on Oct. 20 while undergraduates and graduate students streamed in wearing collared shirts and dress slacks and carrying resumes and business cards. Giants such as Corning, IBM, Intel, and ThermoFisher Scientific, as well...

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MIT physicists turn pencil lead into “gold”
MIT physicists have metaphorically turned graphite, or pencil lead, into gold by isolating five ultrathin flakes stacked in a specific order. The resulting material can then be tuned to exhibit three important properties never before seen in natural graphite. “It is kind of like one-stop shopping,” says Long Ju, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and leader of the work, which is reported in the Oct. 5 issue of Nature Nanotechnology. “Nature has plenty of surprises. In...

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Computational imaging researcher attended a lecture, found...
Soon after Kristina Monakhova started graduate school, she attended a lecture by Professor Laura Waller ’04, MEng ’05, PhD ’10, director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Computational Imaging Lab, who described a kind of computational microscopy with extremely high image resolution. “The talk blew me away,” says Monakhova, who is currently an MIT-Boeing Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “It definitely changed my trajectory and put me on the path to...

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Kristala Prather named head of the Department...
Kristala L. J. Prather ’94, the Arthur Dehon Little Professor, has been named the new head of the Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE), effective Jan. 1, 2024. “Professor Prather has already demonstrated tremendous leadership in her role as executive officer in ChemE. Her contributions to the department, particularly in navigating challenges throughout the pandemic, have made a lasting impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science....

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ILLUMA-T launches to the International Space Station
On Nov. 9, a Lincoln Laboratory–developed laser communications terminal integrated on a NASA-built payload was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle. Cameras inside the launch vehicle enabled the laboratory and a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center team to watch as the payload headed for the International Space Station (ISS), a football-field-sized research platform orbiting Earth about 250 miles above its surface, an altitude known as low Earth orbit (LEO). On the ISS, the terminal — called ILLUMA-T (for...

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Professor Emeritus Walter Hollister, an expert in...
Walter M. Hollister ’53, MS ’59, PhD ’63, MIT professor emeritus in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), passed away Sept. 9 at age 92.  A resident of Lincoln, Massachusetts, Hollister was originally from Rye, New York. As a high school student, he was passionate about athletics, earning five varsity letters in sports. He held two undergraduate college degrees: a BA from Middlebury College, followed by a BS, which he earned in 1953 from MIT’s Department of Electrical...

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Spoken-word collaboration shows off the MIT community’s...
What do you get when you cross MIT student and alumni raps with other community members’ electronic dance music, rhythmic riddles, and heartfelt love songs? You get MITverses, a new spoken-word musical collaboration sponsored by the MIT Music Production Collaborative. Community members from across the Institute were invited to record their singing, vocal loops, and other spoken word music to the project, which was recently published as a compilation on SoundCloud and Spotify. “Usually projects are just for the...

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The power of knowledge
In his early career at MIT, Josh Kuffour’s academic interests spanned mathematics, engineering, and physics. He decided to major in chemical engineering, figuring it would draw on all three areas. Then, he found himself increasingly interested in the mathematical components of his studies and added a second major, applied mathematics. Now, with a double major and energy studies minor, Kuffour is still seeking to learn even more. He has made it a goal to take classes from as many...

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MIT engineers are on a failure-finding mission
From vehicle collision avoidance to airline scheduling systems to power supply grids, many of the services we rely on are managed by computers. As these autonomous systems grow in complexity and ubiquity, so too could the ways in which they fail. Now, MIT engineers have developed an approach that can be paired with any autonomous system, to quickly identify a range of potential failures in that system before they are deployed in the real world. What’s more, the approach...

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Physicists trap electrons in a 3D crystal...
Electrons move through a conducting material like commuters at the height of Manhattan rush hour. The charged particles may jostle and bump against each other, but for the most part they’re unconcerned with other electrons as they hurtle forward, each with their own energy. But when a material’s electrons are trapped together, they can settle into the exact same energy state and start to behave as one. This collective, zombie-like state is what’s known in physics as an electronic...

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The Beaver visits Father Sky: Meet MIT’s...
Earlier this year, MIT’s First Nations Launch team participated in the 2023 First Nations Launch, an international NASA-Artemis Student Challenge hosted by the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium that focuses on Indigenous representation and science in aerospace engineering through rocketry. It was the first time MIT has ever competed in this challenge, now in its 15th year. Over two semesters, an all-Indigenous team of students including both undergraduates and grad students came together to design, build, test, document, present, and...

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