Aerospace Engineering Brown Bag Lecture Series, Madhukarthik Mohanalingam and Tim Chow

The March 4th AE Brown Bag Presentation featured Madhukarthik Mohanalingam and Tim Chow.
Madhukarthik Mohanalingam presented: "Study of a Future Mission to Alpha Centauri".
Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to Earth that could host habitable exoplanets, so a mission to explore it has significant scientific value and will profoundly change the world. Current spaceflight technologies are not sufficient to enable this mission in a reasonable timeframe. Recent mission proposals discuss the potential utilization of lasers to blast nanocraft with light sails up to 0.2 times the speed of light. Such technologies, if successful, will massively shorten the travel time by a factor of two hundred times or even more, compared to existing methods. Although a flyby mission would be easiest, potential methods of slowing down the interstellar spacecraft have also been proposed to allow better study. The development of such a mission would provide several near-term benefits, including fast, efficient access to our solar system and improved, innovative technologies. Pushing the boundaries of engineering and science, we can witness the birth and results of such interstellar missions within our lifetime. This presentation will discuss the purpose of this mission, the technologies and trajectories capable of potentially enabling the mission, the near-term benefits, and ultimate impact.
Tim Chow presented: "Development of Soft Tensegrity Systems for Space Structures and Planetary Exploration"
Tensegrity, short for the term tensional integrity, describes a system comprised of isolated components under compression held together within a tensile network. These tensile forces help keep the structure stable, even to the point when the compression elements experience buckling. Because of their lighter weight and ability to withstand high velocity impacts, tensegrity systems can potentially be adopted for structures in space and those used for planetary exploration. New revolutionary designs involving tensegrity allow for more efficient and cost-effective systems for potential use in planetary missions. This presentation will focus on the efforts involved in the design and development of a system which enables a tensegrity lattice to move robotically, along with efforts to upscale a lattice for large-scale operations.