Aerospace and Space

Contacts

Jason Blough

  • Chair and Distinguished Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
  • Clean Snowmobile Team Faculty Advisor

Jin Choi

  • Professor and Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Walter Milligan

  • Chair, Materials Science and Engineering
  • Franklin M. St. John Professor in Materials Science and Engineering
  • $400K
    funding from NASA
  • 345°C
    temperature range for the dusty thermal vacuum chamber
  • 29K
    kg of water-ice can be produced in a one-year mission
  • $15M
    funding for US-COMP
Paul van Susante and student check his computer.

The Artemis Generation

The Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab, or PSTDL, a group of space-obsessed graduate and undergraduate students at Michigan Tech who compete in a variety of NASA Centennial Challenges. NASA awarded the PSTDL team $400,000 and named them one of four finalists in the Watts on the Moon Challenge.

In NASA's Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge in 2020, the PSTDL team won the top prize—the Artemis Award—for the Tethered permanently-shadowed Region Explorer rover, nicknamed T-REX. PSTDL also advanced to the final stage of NASA's Break the Ice Challenge with a project designed to excavate, refine, and transport water-ice in the polar regions of the moon.