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Spring 2025 Graduation Ceremony Information

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:01:43 +0000

Spring 2025 Graduation Ceremony Information Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/02/2025 - 08:01

Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences will host a commencement ceremony for all graduating aerospace students on May 8, 2025.

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Morton GPS research spotlighted in Science News Explores

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:10:04 +0000

Morton GPS research spotlighted in Science News Explores Jeff Zehnder Tue, 04/01/2025 - 10:10

Jade Morton was interviewed by Science News Explores in a new piece about research conducted with engineers at Google.

The team used the GPS sensors that come standard in every smartphone to collect data on how Earth’s atmosphere warped signals coming from satellites. In the process, they were able to view phenomena in the atmosphere, such as blobs high above the planet known as “plasma bubbles,” in never-before-seen detail.

Morton is a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ and an expert on GNSS remote sensing.

The original research was published in fall 2024 in the journal Nature.

Read the full article at Science News Explores...

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Missile developments in the AI era

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 14:17:56 +0000

Missile developments in the AI era Jeff Zehnder Mon, 03/24/2025 - 08:17

Iain Boyd was interviewed for a new feature in Army Technology.

The business-to-business publication is spotlighting use of artificial intelligence in the military.

Boyd, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is a national security expert and also the director of the CU �鶹ӰԺ Center for National Security Initiatives.

Read the full article at Army-Technology.com...

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Adding AI in the aerospace classroom

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:39:21 +0000

Adding AI in the aerospace classroom Jeff Zehnder Tue, 03/18/2025 - 08:39

Jeff Zehnder

Bobby Hodgkinson is exploring the pluses – and minuses – of generative AI in academia.

An associate teaching professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ, Hodgkinson is working to steer positive AI adoption in education.

“People are starting to feel the effects of AI in business,” Hodgkinson said. “How can we train people to work alongside these tools and position themselves? We owe it to our students to explore what these tools can do well.”

Those efforts are taking multiple forms. Hodgkinson is working to roll out AI tutors for assignments, grading assistance, and data analysis. As AI is still in a state of rapid evolution, some initiatives have gone better than others.

“Accuracy isn’t to the level that we need AI to be, but it’s about 80% and this is the worst it’s going to be. I’ve said to students, ‘I want to expose you to this because you’re going to be entering this new society and I want you to know what it’s good at and where it struggles’,” Hodgkinson said.

He sees particular potential for AI to improve personalization of learning.

“In class, the intent of a test is for me to understand where you are in the learning process. If you give me an incorrect answer I know something is up, but I don’t know what it is. If I can add a box for you to explain your thinking in your own words, I can get a much better idea of where you are, but that is very hard to administer at scale to 100-plus students. An AI can analyze those responses and I can start directing my intervention,” Hodgkinson said.

He is already putting it into practice with student lab reports.

“Instead of a grader having a 25 page lab report they have to review 50 times for 50 different groups, the AI tells the grader this is where you should focus your attention,” he said.

He is currently finishing up work on a paper, to be published by the American Society for Engineering Education, evaluating a class project that incorporated an AI component. Hodgkinson has also led seminars for other aerospace faculty on applications of AI in education.

A major concern with AI systems has been student cheating, but Hodgkinson has an unusually positive attitude.

“If we’re just asking students to do something a machine today can do, I’m cheating them out of an experience. AI is amazing at writing computer code. The expectation of an entry level engineer to only write a few hundred lines of code a week are gone. But AI is not good at creating the architecture for these applications – what does the client want and how do we turn that into tangible tasks,” Hodgkinson said.

As AI tools have advanced, Hodgkinson has found them to be tremendously beneficial in his professional and personal life – helping to write emails and summarize complex concepts, improving his efficiency and allowing exploration of ideas he previously did not have the bandwidth to tackle.

“While I’m walking my dog I’ll be chatting with ChatGPT through my headphones, reasoning through an idea I have,” he said. “I could have that discussion with another person, but when you talk to a person, you’re always thinking about how you will be perceived. Interacting with a machine removes that.”

Hodgkinson is an active member of the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group, a community hoping to advance uses of “AI for good.” It has helped him connect with other university faculty and K-12 educators who are also experimenting with AI.

“The goal is education focused more on the individual student,” he said. “Where are you today, where do you need to be tomorrow, and how do I help get you there. We didn’t have the resources to do that before; there’s not enough hours in the day. Now if I can build a tool, I can do something about it.”

Bobby Hodgkinson is exploring the pluses – and minuses – of generative AI in academia. An associate teaching professor in the...

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Palo interviewed on satellite constellations

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:56:24 +0000

Palo interviewed on satellite constellations Jeff Zehnder Wed, 03/12/2025 - 14:56

Scott Palo is highlighted in a new article discussing Amazon's Kuiper satellite internet service.

The IEEE Spectrum article outlines the company's effort to build out a competitor to SpaceX's Starlink and concerns about the rapidly expanding number of satellites in low earth orbit.

Palo, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is an expert on the design, construction, deployment and operation of small satellite systems.

In the article he discusses the unique challenges of maintaining optical connections between orbiting satellites moving at high speeds.

"Consider standing at opposite ends of a football field with a friend. You and your friend each have a laser pointer and are looking at each other through a straw.”

Read the full article at IEEE Spectrum...

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Aerospace undergrads teaching high school students about rocketry

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 17:17:05 +0000

Aerospace undergrads teaching high school students about rocketry Jeff Zehnder Tue, 03/11/2025 - 11:17

Jeff Zehnder

Sebastian Grabowski and a team of aerospace undergrads are taking on their toughest challenge yet: going back to high school.

A sophomore in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹ӰԺ, Grabowski is an active member of the Sounding Rocket Laboratory, a student club that boasts more than 250 members.

Their primary focus is designing and building rockets that can soar into the stratosphere, but this semester they stretched their abilities in a new way, building an outreach program to inspire the next generation of budding aerospace engineers.

The team worked with the Integrated Teaching & Learning Program (ITLP) on campus to develop a multi-week aerospace and rocketry curriculum for students at Centaurus High School in Lafayette, Colorado.

“It was really exciting. I love the impact we can make on the students and seeing their eyes light up about the topics we covered,” Grabowski said.

Throughout the month of January, teams of SRL students visited Centaurus 3-4 days each week to lead instruction on propulsion, materials, stability and control. In addition to academic instruction, the high school students worked in pairs to build their own model rocket and compete against peers to see who could notch the highest altitude on launch.

“They had two weeks to build the rocket and all of them worked differently. They had to use CAD software and 3D print or laser cut their own components. They were testing drag caused by the fins and nose cones,” Grabowski said.

Centaurus is an engineering-oriented high school, and students have access to makerspace equipment, like 3D printers, not available to many teens. However, when it came to classroom instruction, they were still a tough audience for SRL.

“You ask a question in class and no one raises their hands,” Grabowski said. “They’re just silent. It took a lot of trial and error, but I have a bunch of rocket explosion videos on my phone and that got people engaged. ‘What went wrong here? This failure was as simple as forgetting to put a screw in one location.’ You start talking about the explosion and you can get in on a foundational level.”

As part of the curriculum, the team hosted an industry panel with invited guests discussing career goals, internships, and how to choose a college.

“We were scheduled to meet with just one class, but a second teacher stopped by and saw what all we had put into the presentation and asked us to talk to their students too,” Grabowski.

When launch day arrived, the 16 teams of Centaurus students were ready with their rockets. For the event, ITLP supplied SRL with a cache of tiny altimeter sensors that would fit on each rocket to measure their maximum elevation.

“A few of the rockets didn’t come back down where they were supposed to, or the parachute didn’t deploy correctly, but that’s part of the design, build, and test process. The highest rockets got up to 200-300 feet in altitude. I really think it was a success,” Grabowski said.

Sebastian Grabowski and a team of aerospace undergrads are taking on their toughest challenge yet: going back to high school. A sophomore, Grabowski is an active member of the Sounding Rocket Laboratory, a student club that boasts more than...

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Deep sea vs. deep space in Discover Magazine

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 14:50:35 +0000

Deep sea vs. deep space in Discover Magazine Jeff Zehnder Tue, 03/11/2025 - 08:50

David Klaus is featured in a new Discover Magazine article.

The feature discusses unique and similar risks to exploring deep space and the ocean floor here on Earth.

Klaus, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is an expert on spacecraft habitat design and operations as well as life support system development.

Although the deep recesses of the ocean are much closer than the far reaches of space, only about 26 percent of the ocean floor has been explored.

Many of the challenges astronauts face living in space are similar to those of deep sea divers.

“The fundamental functions are, for all practical purposes, the same, but the difference is in how you meet those functions,” says Klaus.

Read the full article at Discover Magazine...

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Science News spotlights cubesat research

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 17:36:43 +0000

Science News spotlights cubesat research Jeff Zehnder Thu, 02/27/2025 - 10:36

Research from the Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) CubeSat is being showcased by Science News.

Designed at built at CU �鶹ӰԺ and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, CIRBE is conducting sophisticated, fine-grain measurements of the Van Allen Belts.

Following the largest solar storm in two decades, scientists discovered in summer 2024 that the storm created two new temporary belts of energetic particles encircling Earth.

“These stayed for months, until another even smaller storm perturbed them,” said Professor Xinlin Li, principal investigator for the cubesat project.

Read the full article at Science News...

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Congratulations Skyward Showcase 2025 honorees

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:53:26 +0000

Congratulations Skyward Showcase 2025 honorees Jeff Zehnder Tue, 02/11/2025 - 11:53

Jeff Zehnder

The four winners.

The 2025 Skyward Showcase provided students and faculty in an opportunity to give 10-minute talks highlighting current research in a friendly and informal environment.

Hosted by the Smead Scholars, the event, formerly titled Researchpalooza, featured 31 undegraduate, masters, and PhD students presenting their research.

Congratulations to four students for receiving top honors at the event:

Best Overall: Paraksh Vankawala (Advisor: Bob Marshall) "Computer Vision-Guided Analysis of Plasma Waves in the Inner Magnetosphere
Best 1st year graduate: Mark Boyer (Advisor: Zach Sunberg) "Holistic, human-centered evaluations of explainable AI"
Best undergraduate: Cai Kenemore "ACS3 Anomaly Characterization Using Ground Based Event Camera"
Best Memes/Most Entertaining: Arvind Jayashankara Aradhya (Advisor: Kevin Gifford) "Real-time Geospatial Spectrum Sharing Between Earth Exploration Satellite Services and Communication Networks via Geofencing of co-operative 5G/6G transmitters".

Held Friday, Feb. 7, it also featured a keynote address by Smead Scholar alumnus Dylan Boone of NASA JPL on the Europa Clipper mission and a closing talk by Research Professor Delores Knipp on the major solar storm in May 2024.

Flickr Album of the Event

2025 Skyward Showcase provided students and faculty in an opportunity to give 10-minute talks highlighting current research in a friendly and informal environment.Hosted by the Smead Scholars, the event, formerly...

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Space-based Earth imaging from Colorado – Q&A with the CEO of Maxar Intelligence

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 20:19:41 +0000

Space-based Earth imaging from Colorado – Q&A with the CEO of Maxar Intelligence Jeff Zehnder Wed, 01/29/2025 - 13:19

Jeff Zehnder

Dan Smoot discussed his career and work as CEO of Maxar Intelligence in a special presentation at the �鶹ӰԺ.

Smoot addressed the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences on Tuesday, Jan. 21, answering questions on his life, the future of space-based Earth imaging, and Maxar’s fleet of Earth observation satellites.

The company, based in Westminster, Colorado, oversees the most advanced commercial Earth observation constellation, operates in 85+ countries, and employs over 2,200 people.

What’s it like launching a satellite?

Each one of these satellites costs anywhere between $200-300 million. We launched two in May. We launched another two in August. If all goes to plan, we’ll have two more in the February time frame. The new satellites will have a 30 cm resolution, giving us the ability to collect more than 6 million sq km of Earth imagery each day. That includes up to 15 revisits per day of some locations on Earth.

We have a satellite, GeoEye-1, that’s still in operation and about to get to 100,000 rotations around Earth, which is an amazing accomplishment.

How do you deal with cloud cover when collecting imagery?

Maxar is phenomenal at the planning side. There is a location in Latin America just outside Bogota, Colombia, where you can collect one image a year because of cloud cover. It’s crazy. You have to plan it.

The Korean peninsula is another high cloud cover area. We’ll get a task order and we have to plan it. When we’re supporting an intelligence mission where collecting an image is a “must,” we have a partnership with a company called Umbra which specializes in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. SAR allows you to see through clouds, identifying outlines of objects to give you a sense of what’s happening on the ground. We can then fly back over with our imagery and get a clear view. We have data scientists working on that all the time.

If you’re collecting thousands of new images a day, do people go through all of those manually?

We have more than 400,000 government and commercial users around the world, and with the advancements in AI and more importantly large language models, we’re moving into not just collecting imagery but actually producing data on change.

If we’re just delivering imagery at this massive scale, how do they actually know something has happened? We use an algorithm to tell you what changed. If you’ve ever seen an analyst looking through 100 different images, it’s painful. If I can tell you automatically what changed instead, I have a product.

I’ve done just about every job under the sun. When you think about what you’re going to do next, don’t ever think you need to go one path. Life is about happenstance. "

What was your career path?

I’ve done just about every job under the sun. I was an engineer, then I was a sales guy. I ran a finance organization at one time. You learn everything through your career. When you think about what you’re going to do next, don’t ever think you need to go one path.

Life is about happenstance. I ran into somebody at a Christmas party who was a branch manager at IBM. I started talking about how I loved their logistic controls that helped pneumatic conveyance and she asked me to interview with her. I had no concept or clue that I’d become a systems engineer at IBM.

I got well known pretty quickly as a guy who fixes stuff. I just love fixing things. If somebody throws something really hard at you? Take it. Because you’re going to learn a ton.

Your undergraduate degree is in environmental studies. Does your passion for the environment come into play at Maxar?

We help monitor illegal mining. Illegal deforestation. Human trafficking. We actually worked with the Associated Press to stop slave-based fishing. There were people who had not seen land for almost 10 years out near Singapore. We tracked them. We stopped it.

How much of an issue is orbital debris?

I was at our Mission Operations Center the other day and alert came up: collision. There are 22,000 pieces of debris up there. It looks like the world’s worst air traffic control. What are you going to do? The engineer said we have 24 hours to shift our orbit slightly. By the way, when we say shift, it’s usually about 10,000 km. Operating the satellites is a 24-hour, all-the-time thing.

Aren’t you able to collect images of objects in space, too?

Yes. I thought I was fairly good at math until I understood we’re starting to take imagery of other satellites in orbit. We had someone launch and they couldn’t find their satellite. We knew the coordinates of about where it was. We’re moving 18,000 mph this way; they’re moving 18,000 mph that way. We nailed it. Got the image so clean we could tell they were spinning. We gave that back to the company and they were able to stabilize the satellite.

Trying to capture that moment is hard. It’s one thing taking a picture of the International Space Station, because you know where it is all the time. We don’t know where an adversarial satellite might be going. You have to figure out the calculus of how to do that. Non-Earth imaging is a fast growing business.

How do you deal with countries deploying anti-satellite technology?

GPS-denied environments are an issue. There are certain nations that have the ability to make high-megahertz pulses targeted straight up. Primarily they’re targeting drones, but they also can impact satellites. We have concept of operations (CONOPS) so as were going through those areas, we know how to handle it.

We’re also building solutions to these problems, mainly for drones. If you’re flying drones and you don’t have GPS, what happens? It just crash and burns. But what if you have a company that has a highly accurate, precise 3D map of the entire world? You take the 3D map and you can triangulate where that drone is based on the landscape. Do you need GPS anymore? No. It is a capability that Maxar just demonstrated on live drones to show they can fly right through GPS-denied environments.

Smoot visited Smead Aerospace as part of the Future Insights seminar series, hosted by Mark Sirangelo, entrepreneur-in-residence. This series brings aerospace leaders to campus to meet with students and discuss their careers and the future of industry.

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