In parallel to completing the academic portion of my Master's degree, I worked as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) at the Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL). This work started the first semester of my Master's degree through the second to last semester where I transitioned to working part-time at Momentus. Working as a GRA at the ASDL entails participating in deliverable-focused projects with a high level of collaboration and interaction with industry partners. Although the technical work varies to a great extent from project to project, GRA work typically starts with a technically minded prompt or challenge from an industry stakeholder, we then work as a small team of graduate students to turn that prompt into an specific technical problem which we can provide an answer to within the scope of the project, and then being solving the problem. As part of this work there is also an placed emphasis on presenting technical progress to academic advisors and industry stakeholders through planned reviews or conference papers.
As a GRA, I worked on two main research projects, the first involving the assessment of urban aerial mobility system-of-systems and the second involving the coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) - Rigid Body Dynamics (RBD) simulation of planetary entry vehicles.
There is significant interest in sending various scientific missions to the Martian surface. Due to the large amount of kinetic energy coming from an interplanetary trajectory, such missions typically opt for a blunt-body capsule which allow for dissipation of kinetic energy though a strong bow shock. While free-flight projectiles of many different types are often studied using coupled CFD-RBD simulations, Mars entry capsules have the added complexity of being actively controlled using Reaction Control Systems (RCS). This entails that typical CFD-RBD simulation frameworks are not adaquately equipped to study such problems and additional capabilities must be added to such environments to study the planetary entry of RCS-controlled Mars vehicles.