School of Aerospace Engineering

Gebhardt Distinguished Lecture

  If You Can’t Create Space in Your Lab, 
Create Your Lab in Space

featuring

David W. Miller

Technologist for the Astronomy and Physics Directorate | NASA JPL

Thursday, November 6
11am - 12pm
Guggenheim 442

About the Seminar: 
Experimentation is an essential step in maturing technology. Whether it is to measure new phenomena, assess the repeatability and reliability of components, calibrate simulations, determine performance limits, identify operational drivers, or to demonstrate to a decision-maker that the technology works, those experiments must be conducted in an operationally authentic environment. For space, those environments include thermal, radiation, vacuum, lighting conditions, orbital dynamics, the “view,” and long-duration micro-gravity. The first four can be tested to some fidelity in ground-based chambers but the latter three require testing in space.

Analogous to a wind tunnel, testing in long duration micro-gravity allows a formative technology to be tested, under nominal and (more importantly) off-nominal conditions, without harm to the technology, the operator and the platform. This talk will illustrate the use of Shuttle, Mir and the International Space Station as research platforms for maturing space technology whose behavior is dependent upon long duration micro-gravity. This will be done through the lens of three evolvable research facilities (MODE, MACE and SPHERES) developed at MIT over the past three decades. 

About the Speaker: 
David W. Miller is the former Director of the Space Systems Laboratory and the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at M.I.T. Prof. Miller has played an engineering role in the development of space-based apertures. He was a member of the JWST Product Integrity Team and the Vice Chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. He recently served two and a half years as NASA's Chief Technologist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC and three years as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at the Aerospace Corporation. He is currently the Technologist for the Astronomy and Physics Directorate at JPL.

His research includes dynamics and controls for satellite formation flight, vibration suppression and isolation, and thin face-sheet active and adaptive optics. Prof. Miller has helped develop an extensive set of dynamics and controls technology laboratories on the Shuttle, MIR, and ISS. Prof. Miller has reconfigurable spacecraft and constellation concepts that permit repair, inspection, assembly, upgrade, fractionation and multi-mission functionality through proximity operations and docking of modular satellites utilizing universal, standardized interfaces. He has also helped develop a technique to control satellite formations, without the need for propellant, using high temperature super-conducting electromagnets. He was the PI for the Regolith X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS) for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission under the NASA New Frontiers Program.

Dr Miller’s Middeck Active Control Experiment (MACE) which flew on STS-67 in March, 1995 was built as a pathfinder for a “qualification procedure for flexible, precision-controlled spacecraft to increase confidence in the eventual orbital performance of future spacecraft that cannot be dynamically tested on the ground in a sufficiently realistic zero-gravity simulation.” The integrated modeling tools developed for MACE were some of the first in the field of integrated modeling and influenced the verification process for JWST. His SPHERES facility on ISS (2006-2020) was the first long-duration micro-gravity free-flier testbed and was used to develop formation flight control and machine vision navigation and characterization in support of future, sparse aperture telescopes.

Prof. Miller developed a unique, multi-semester, hands-on class at MIT that immerses undergraduates in the end-to-end lifecycle process of developing and operating aerospace vehicles, some of which evolve into ISS laboratories. He has extended this educational model to the graduate level to provide Air Force officers with hands-on satellite development