Acta Astronautica Article Published!

Colby Merrill (2nd year PhD student) just published their first journal article! In their first year at Cornell, they produced a mission design to create a contact binary asteroid and observe its formation process. They presented the first iteration of this work at JHU/APL and a further iteration at the 8th International Planetary Defense Conference. The paper is titled “Creating a contact binary via spacecraft impact to near-Earth binary asteroid (350751) 2002 AW” and features contributions from ASTRAlab members Carl Geiger and Abu Tahsin, SIOSlab PI Dmitry Savransky, and SSDS PI Mason Peck. Access the full publication here.

Research Trip to NRC HAA

As a member of the GPI2.0 CAL2 team, Duan Li visited the NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre (HAA) last week. She worked with William Thompson and Christian Marois, and conducted wavefront sensing and control experiments (e.g. speckle nulling) on SPIDERS (Subaru Pathfinder Instrument for Detecting Exoplanets & Retrieving Spectra).

JOSA A paper published

“Image plane wavefront sensing and Kalman filtering for automated alignment of off-axis aspherics” by Duan Li and Dmitry Savransky has been published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America A and is available here. The paper presents an automated alignment technique on a double off-axis parabolic mirror system, with high accuracy and robustness to uncertainties.