Our new Sailing to the Stars team gets featured by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers! SSDS PhD candidate Josh Umansky-Castro and undergraduate Verena Padres provide an overview of the mission and share their experience starting/leading the project! Read more.

Cornell spotlight on our Sailing to the Stars mission lead, Verena Padres! Read more.

Cornell Chronicle article announcing the start of our Sailing to the Stars mission on the ISS! In this experiment, astronauts shall deploy light sails on the space station and livestream video footage back down to Earth! Congratulations to SSDS members Josh and Verena for starting up the project! Read more .

Professors Mason Peck (SSDS) and Elaine Petro (ASTRA Lab) team up to launch “Spaceflight Mechanics: The Cornell Space Technology Podcast” Read more.

With a $5M grant from the DOD, Cornell opens the New York Consortium for Space Technology Innovation and Development. Directed by Mason Peck, the consortium aims to bolster U.S. space technology research and manufacturing capabilities by uniting industry, academic and government partners across New York state. Read more.

SSDS student Gillis Lowry ‘23 and PhD candidate Joshua Umansky-Castro collaborate with the Intrepid museum in NYC on “Postcards from Earth: Holograms on an Interstellar Journey.” This 8-month exhibition showcases the Alpha CubeSat mission and the holographic artwork flying on board, courtesy of artists C Bangs and Martina Mrongovius. Read more.

Congratulations to Cislunar Explorers I&T lead Nidhi Sonwalkar for being selected for the Brooke Owens Fellowship! As part of the fellowship program, Nidhi will intern with Northrop Grumman this summer! Read more here.

Congratulations for Emily Matteson ‘23, Mission Lead for the Cislunar Explorers CubeSat, for being named a Matthew Isakowitz Fellow (2023) and a Brooke Owens Fellow (2022). Read more here.

SSDS graduate Hunter Adams, now a lecturer in Cornell’s ECE department, returns his ChipSat work for an exiting launch opportunity. ChipSats were launched and ejected into free-fall as part of Flight Test 10 of the Suborbital Accelerator developed by the space tech company SpinLaunch. This is the first test flight to host payloads, and proved that ChipSats could survive the extreme launch environment (spinning at nearly 5,000 miles-per-hour!) Read more.

Founded in 2020, Varda Space Industries is attempting in-space manufacturing: making materials in microgravity and returning them to Earth! This spotlight features Will Bruey, CEO and co-founder, and Wendy Shimata, Director of Autonomous Systems. They got their start working on the Violet and CUSat missions here at SSDS! Read more here.

The Pathfinder for Autonomous Navigation (PAN) Satellites are integrated and about to launch! By demonstrating that autonomous rendezvous and docking are possible at the small spacecraft scale, the project provides a critical step towards the eventual construction of advanced structures such as space stations, as well as the refueling and repairing of small spacecraft. Read more.

SSDS graduate Laura Jones-Wilson is featured in the Cornell Chronicle. She discusses her experiences at Cornell leading student projects in the lab, and her path to her current role at NASA’s JPL. Read more.

Mason Peck is among the Cornell faculty that make up the science advisory team for the new season of Cosmos. Written, directed, and produced by Ann Druyan, and hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the show’s early episodes feature Breakthrough Starshot’s journey to the stars. There’s even a closeup of our “Starchip” concept in the pilot! Read more.

Doctoral student Hunter Adams is deploying tiny satellites on the Earth’s surface to monitor environmental conditions as a dry run for using the technology for space research. Read more.

Mason’s SSDS is featured in Cornell MAE’s Fall 2019 Magazine. The article highlights Stewart Aslan’s work on PAN, as well as PhD candidate Hunter Adams’ work on ChipSats for both the Alpha light sail project and commercialization for agriculture. Read more.

Teams of high-school and college students from all 193 countries of the United Nations will send 500 miniature spacecraft to the surface of the moon as part of the Great Lunar Expedition for Everyone (GLEE). The mission is being led by NASA’s New York and Colorado Space Grant Consortia, and the palm-sized spacecraft, called LunaSats, are based on technology developed at SSDS. Read more.

The KickSat-2 mission, led by now graduate Zac Manchester, successfully deployed 105 ChipSats into low Earth orbit on March 18th, 2019. Transmissions from these mW-level probes were detected on the ground! Read more.

The unique properties of holograms could be used to stabilize spacecraft and carry huge amounts of data to the universe. C Bangs, Greg Matloff, and Martina Mrongovius discuss holography’s applications in Breakthrough Starshot as well as the upcoming Cornell Alpha CubeSat mission. Read more.

Frankie was a part of the team testing the performance of a flux-pinned interface for Mars Sample Return missions. Her work is in collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Read More

The event highlighted new technologies in the aerospace industry, including those that may enable future exploratory missions to Mars or deep space asteroids. Read More

The Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR) mission would acquire a sample from the nucleus of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and return it to Earth. The mission is spearheaded by the Astronomy department, with Mason Peck contributing to the spacecraft engineering aspects. If selected, SSDS may participate in the mission by deploying a collection of ChipSats into the comet’s plume. Read more.

NBC News

Sprite satellites built by researchers at Cornell University were launched in June 2017. Read more

Cornell Chronicle

Research into electrolysis propulsion – using water as rocket fuel – has led to a Cornell engineering team earning a shot at space-flight history. Read more

Mason Peck’s group at Cornell University built what they call Sprites, smartphonelike chips that carry a light sensor, solar panels and a radio and weigh four grams each. The Starshot chips would be modeled on the Sprites but would weigh even less, around a gram, and carry four cameras apiece. Read more.

Nature

The upcoming chipsat test, called KickSat-2, is the second incarnation of a crowdfunded mission developed by researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Read more

Cornell SSDS faculty and alumni are helping to advise Breakthrough Starshot – a $100 million research and engineering project aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for light-propelled nanocraft that could capture and send back images and scientific data in our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. Read more.

NASA 360 joins Dr. Mason Peck of Cornell University as he discusses his NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) for soft-robotic rovers with electrodynamic power scavenging. Watch here.

Cornell Chronicle

Mason Peck, who served as NASA’s chief technologist from January 2012 to December 2013, received the agency’s Distinguished Public Service Medal during a March 7 ceremony. Read more