News

Commercial airplanes can be controlled by autopilot. But what happens if a wing gets damaged or an engine malfunctions? Is it possible to design a software system with a feedback loop — a system that quickly tests how controls operate on the damaged vessel and makes adjustments on the fly to give it the best chance of landing safely?

Texas Engineers are leading a multi-university research team, funded by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, that will build technology and tools to improve measurement of important climate factors by observing atoms in outer space. They will focus on the concept of quantum sensing, which involves observing how atoms react to small changes in their environment, and using that to infer the time-variations in the gravity field of the Earth. This will enable scientists to improve how accurately several important climate processes can be measured, such as the sea level rise, the rate of ice melt, the changes in land water resources and ocean heat storage changes.

The "Autonomous Aerial Cargo Operations at Scale" program held a roundtable at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. This roundtable aimed to validate their CONOPS that characterized six relevant operational scenarios. The purpose was to define research questions that the team would address and to identify potential datasets or information that could be used to answer these questions. The team sought feedback and discussions with local Appalachia stakeholders to determine if the proposed scenarios were realistic, feasible, and pertinent and to enable autonomous operations in both rural Appalachia and dense metropolitan areas. Participants engaged with experts from Purdue University, MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Morgan State University, and Cavan Solutions.