University News

Watching your payload shatter as it hits the ground at 50 mph would be disheartening to most, but to the members of a unique Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University club, failure is just an opportunity to improve.

Two students from Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University’s Space Technologies Laboratory recently visited Intuitive Machines (IM) in Houston to put the finishing touches on the EagleCam CubeSat, which is scheduled to launch to the moon later this year.

Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University student Patrick Hunter has his career sights set on remote piloting drones to utilize uncrewed aircraft systems in exciting, new ways. Already, as a student in the Master of Science in Unmanned Systems program, he has been involved in a project using drones to track endangered turtles.

Taylor M. Yow set her career path in high school. More than anything, she wanted to become an engineer, working on spacecraft and orbital calculations. She didn’t realize just how quickly she would become a part of science history after arriving at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University.

Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University students are designing a rocket that can soar through the Earth’s atmosphere and reach outer space, only to be recovered through a parachute system for reuse. The project’s aim is to make spaceflight more affordable to researchers — especially student researchers and those working in higher education.

When an animal’s life is at stake, every second counts. Nowhere is this felt more keenly than southern Africa’s game reserves, where increasingly sophisticated poaching squads are decimating elephant and rhino populations on a daily basis.

Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University was selected to participate in a national effort to bolster the engineering workforce, receiving a grant of $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation to provide STEM scholarships to students in accelerated bachelor’s-plus-master’s degree programs.

It was a moment 11 years in the making — back when the Project Prometheus initiative launched in 2011 with the goal of making functional solid rocket fuel at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University — but the wait paid off last week when Engineering students successfully tested manmade fuel at the Daytona Beach Campus.

Just as a rock thrown into a pond creates an undulating pattern of circular ripples, some double star systems called binaries can push rings of dust into space as one star orbits around its partner, Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University astronomer Noel D. Richardson explains.

As a student, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University alumna Rocio Frej Vitalle ('12) worked in the Eagle Flight Research Center, which helped land her first job modeling and simulating uncrewed flights for FAA NextGen projects.

Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University researchers are working on technology that could make fusion power generation economically viable, thanks to a $670,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Researchers at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University’s Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab (SAIL) took part in two recent NASA sounding rocket launches — one in far-north Ny Ålesund, Norway, and another at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.