Research Projects

High Spectral Resolution Observations of Lunar Exospheric Emissions

PI Edwin Mierkiewicz

We are employing high-resolution Fabry-Perot spectroscopy of neutral sodium and potassium emission to investigate the morphology and dynamics of the lunar sodium exosphere. Likely atmosphere source mechanisms are thermal desorption, photo-desorption, ion sputtering, and meteoric impact ablation.

Their relative importance remains uncertain, both with regard to spatial and to temporal trends. Once released, sputtered gases in the lunar atmosphere can be pulled back to the regolith by gravity, escape to space, get pushed away by solar radiation pressure, or become photoionized and swept away by the solar wind. To test hypotheses about the sources, sinks, and escape of the lunar atmosphere, velocity-resolved observations under different lunar phases, altitudes, latitudes, and time histories are being made to help understand factors that link resultant morphologies to sources and solar radiation effects. These observations will help constrain atmospheric and surface-process modeling, and help quantify the source and escape mechanisms.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Environmental Analysis of Convective Initiation Events in Central Florida using Integrated Mobile Observation

PI Shawn Milrad

PI Daniel Halperin

This research collaboration with the National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Office Tampa Bay aims to develop an ingredients-based methodology to help improve forecasts of first-strike cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in summer thunderstorms across Central Florida. Results will be used to construct a new forecast tool that will aid NWS forecasters in protecting the region’s life and property from these dangerous lightning events.

Lightning is a major hazard to life and property in Florida and annually leads the nation in lightning strikes and fatalities. The proposed research collaboration with the National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Office Tampa Bay aims to develop an ingredients-based methodology to help forecast first strike cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in warm-season thunderstorms across Central Florida. A comprehensive environmental analysis of these convective initiation events is being performed using numerous observational datasets, including mobile radar and surface observations from recent ERAU field courses and campaigns. The environmental analysis will examine first-strike events across the eight large-scale flow regimes previously identified by NWS Tampa Bay. A particular focus is placed on events that occurred during four weeks of ERAU field courses/campaigns in 2015 and 2018, allowing for the unique integration of mobile observations. Results are being used to construct a new forecast tool integrated with existing radar- and satellite-based lightning tools, to improve first-strike alert lead times. Also, the proposed project has established a fruitful collaborative research relationship between ERAU and NWS Tampa Bay while providing research experience and training for several ERAU undergraduate meteorology majors. These undergraduate students have completed much of the work on the project and have gotten to interact with NWS Tampa Bay personnel. It is expected that this project will also stimulate future more significant research collaborations between ERAU Meteorology and regional NWS forecast offices.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Pilot-in-the-Loop UAS Mobile Research Test-Bed

PI Hever Moncayo

CO-I May Chan

CO-I Ashwini Agrawal

CO-I Agustin Giovagnoli

This project aims to develop and implement a Mobile UAV Ground Control Station (GCS) supporting aviation safety research with pilot-in-the-loop capabilities using unmanned aerial systems platforms, in which flight conditions, such as systems failures, could be simulated in real-time to characterize pilot response, control laws performance, and human-machine and control laws interactions.

A fruitful achievement of this project will provide a platform to validate and assess new concepts and technologies that are beneficial for improving engineering fidelity of early systems integration testing based on pilots feedback and their interaction with on-board flight controls systems.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Shielded UAS Operations Detect and Avoid

PI Hever Moncayo

This effort is intended to identify risks and recommend solutions to the FAA that enable shielded UAS operations

This project is funded under the FAA ASSURE program. Certain small UAS (sUAS) Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, such as structural inspection, may be in close proximity to structures that are collision hazards for manned aircraft. These types of operations that are in close proximity to manned aviation flight obstacles such that they provide significant protection from conflicts and collisions with manned aircraft are termed “shielded” operations. This effort is intended to identify risks and recommend solutions to the FAA that enable shielded UAS operations. Several topics related to this project include simulation of dynamic systems, simulation environment programming, guidance, control and dynamics, and hardware implementation.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Vision and Wireless-Based Surveying for Intelligent OSAM Navigation (VISION)

PI Hever Moncayo

CO-I Kadriye Merve Dogan

In this project, which is a SpaceWERX Phase I STTR program with Orbital Prime, we are developing algorithms to increase autonomy of OSAM applications.

In this project, which is a SpaceWERX Phase I STTR program with Orbital Prime, we are developing algorithms to increase autonomy of OSAM applications. This includes the application of machine learning techniques to improve accuracy of position and orientation estimation for proximity operations in space. Machine learning include deep learning combined with vision-based navigation designed and tested in both, virtual simulation environment and actual thrust-based spacecraft system.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Mitigating GPS and ADS-B Risks for UAS

PI Hever Moncayo

In this project, the research team is investigating different strategies to mitigate such risks and proposing methodologies to increase safety of UAS operations within the National Airspace.

This project is funded under the FAA ASSURE program. Unvalidated or unavailable GPS and “ADS-B In” data poses security and safety risks to automated UAS navigation and to Detect and Avoid operations. Erroneous, spoofed, jammed or dropouts of GPS data may result in unmanned aircraft position and navigation being incorrect. This may result in a fly away beyond radio control, flight into infrastructure or flight into controlled airspace. Erroneous, spoofed, jammed or dropouts of “ADSB-In” data may result in automated unmanned aircraft being unable to detect and avoid other aircraft or result in detecting and avoiding illusionary aircraft.

In this project, the research team is investigating different strategies to mitigate such risks and proposing methodologies to increase safety of UAS operations within the National Airspace. Several topics related to this project include simulation of dynamic systems, artificial intelligence, flight testing of UAS and hardware implementation.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Deep-Learning-Based Unobtrusive Estimation of Pilot Adverse Interactions and Loss of Energy State Awareness

PI Hever Moncayo

This project aimed at gaining more insight into the mechanisms of pilot SD and LESA occurrence, capturing their dynamic fingerprint, and developing on-board intelligent schemes capable of predicting and detecting these dangerous phenomena associated to pilot behaviors.

Findings: Final report submitted 9/24. Each of the mathematical models showed good capabilities of estimating each of the pilot parameters and represent a promising tool towards the characterization of pilot behavior using learning components. Continuation can be pursued by generalizing or extending the proposed results to other aircraft-pilot dynamics, possibly eVTOLs for AAM.

Student and Curriculum impact. The simulation and testing tools will be integrated as part of the experiential learning of the course AE623 Guidance, Navigation and Control that will be taught by the PI next Fall 2025. The proposed technique also allowed a master student in Aerospace Engineering to complement and enhance her thesis outcomes.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Efficient Management of Certificate Revocation List (CRL)

PI Shafika Showkat Moni

Most of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based security and privacy solutions for VANETs use pseudonyms where each vehicle gets multiple identities to improve privacy significantly.

Most of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based security and privacy solutions for VANETs use pseudonyms where each vehicle gets multiple identities to improve privacy significantly. A vehicle needs 720 pseudonyms in 24 hours and 262,800 pseudonyms in 1 year, according to the US-based SAE J2735 standard. Trusted Authority (TA) revokes all the pseudonyms assigned to a malicious vehicle and stores them in the CRL. However, the overhead of maintaining such a large volume of identities is overwhelming for traditional CRL-based solutions. In turn, it incurs a higher delay to update and broadcast the CRL periodically. We have designed a novel approach by leveraging the Cuckoo Filter to reduce the storage, computation, and communication overhead associated with the CRL in VANET. The cuckoo filter contains only one entry for all pseudonyms of a revoked vehicle, thereby minimizing the overhead associated with CRL verification. Our scheme also provides an efficient lookup operation for vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs) in a Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) scenario.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme

PI Shafika Showkat Moni

This research project focuses on designing efficient privacy-preserving authentication schemes to reduce the communication and computation overhead related to authenticating entities in VANET.

This research project focuses on designing efficient privacy-preserving authentication schemes to reduce the communication and computation overhead related to authenticating entities in VANET. We have exploited Merkle Hash Tree and Modified Merkle Patricia Trie (MMPT) to overcome the performance limitations of the conventional approach of authentication, such as the ECDSA algorithm for efficient authentication of Road Side Units (RSUs) and Vehicles in VANET. A detailed security analysis is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of our authentication scheme against message modification attacks, replay attacks, and message injection attacks. Performance evaluation also shows that the proposed scheme has a significantly lower authentication overhead than other related schemes.

Categories: Faculty-Staff

Critical Fora Discussing U.S.-Japan Space Security Cooperation

PI Elisabeth Murray

The proposed project aims to bring together leading American and Japanese space security experts with students and faculty from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) for a dialogue on the current state of space security and the potential for cooperation between Japan and the United States.

At the core of this project are two central goals. The first is the creation of an undergraduate-level course on U.S.-Japan Space Security Cooperation, which will be developed as part of the Security Studies and International Affairs (SSIA) Department’s Spring 2026 offerings at ERAU, a leading institution in aviation and aerospace; the second is to provide heightened public engagement between residents of the Space Coast and leading policy and academic practitioners in the field of U.S.-Japan space security.

To meet these goals, eight (8) space security experts from Japan and the U.S. will be invited to deliver a public lectures, providing both students, whose attendance will be required, faculty, and the larger public in and around the Space Coast with a unique opportunity to engage directly with leaders in the field, fostering an exchange of ideas that bridges theoretical knowledge with real-world perspectives. Through this dialogue, the project seeks to inspire students aspiring to pursue security-related careers in government policy and space industry advancement.

The project explores key questions in U.S.-Japan space security cooperation, such as: How can both nations enhance collaboration to address shared security challenges in space? What strategic and policy gaps exist, and how can these gaps be bridged to strengthen bilateral cooperation? Through these and other discussions, ERAU students and lecture attendees will gain insights into the complex dynamics of space security, and the challenges and opportunities inherent in U.S.-Japan cooperation in the space domain.

The proposed project thus has the following objectives:

1) Educational Outreach: The course and public lectures will deepen understanding of U.S.-Japan Space Security Cooperation and expose the audience to leading scholars and practitioners in this field; impact will be furthered through the creation of a sharable course dossier, a special issue journal written by undergraduate students, and the development of a grant proposal funding a topic-focused workshop in 2027.
2) Promoting Dialogue: The project will encourage the exchange of ideas between leading experts and the next generation of security professionals and industry leaders;
3) Fostering Next-Generation Solutions: The project aims to inspire innovative thinking on a global issue of mutual importance in the next generation of military and civilian policymakers and practitioners.

Categories: Faculty-Staff