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As America’s oldest and most respected university aerospace program, MIT Aereoastro’s vision is to enable novel aerospace and aerospace-related systems through education and research, as well as to use these systems to inspire future generations of engineers – with the ultimate aim of stimulating and maintaining excitement about aeronautics amongst generations to come. MIT Aeroastro’s Space Systems Laboratory exemplifies this vision. Its mission is twofold: to build state of the art systems from the ground up for use in space; and to revolutionize the way engineering is taught, from grade school level all the way to post-grad.
Since its inception in 1995, MIT SSL has been consistently successful, with at least a 1/3 of its projects making it into space. With expertise in structural dynamics, attitude determination and control, avionics, communications, optical and RF payloads, systems engineering, and integrated modeling and simulation SSL works with academia, industry and government to develop everything from on-orbit test beds to small satellites. Through its SPHERES program, MIT SSL is allowing students as well as high schoolers to program nano-satellites on the International Space Station, while it’s REXIS project will put an X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer on an asteroid through NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission. Bringing a wide range of systems together, making them work, and getting them into space, is key to what MIT SSL does.
