More about research

I should note here that this project is not "my" project, but rather a project on which I am privileged to be doing some work. The SSLC is the culmination of a lot of work by a lot of people, and here I will list some few of them and describe what they have done. This should serve not only to thank those of my colleagues and advisors who have contributed, but also to illustrate in some detail how many projects today are interconnected with others and how large numbers of people often work very closely together.

There are two major projects which came together to make the SSLC. The first project I would like to mention is an effort on small logistics carriers, headed up over last summer by Wilfried Hofstetter, a PhD student in my department at MIT. Wilfried is a member of my research group and has brought me into a lot of interesting projects; this was one. He was interested in developing a smaller, more flexible carrier for logistics purposes, and had done the groundwork for it. I helped with a few small measurements, and then Wilfried and I presented the work to the research group headed by Professor Ed Crawley, who is one of my advisors. We received a number of interesting comments, and even presented the project to a group of logistics experts at NASA. Once again, invaluable feedback was received. The project went on hiatus for some time while we all worked on other things, and then one day I went to a student conference with my colleague Zahra Khan. We were sitting in a booth presenting some work on Mars Sample Return missions, when our labmate Arthur Guest walked up and started chatting. Zahra told me and Arthur about her position on Expedition Epsilon to the Mars Desert Research Station, and we both agreed that it sounded like a wonderful opportunity. We knew that researchers were still sought for the mission, but we had no project of immediate interest to the organizers.

That night, at a departmental dinner, I sat down next to a graduate student named Abe Grindle, who told me about some very interesting work he was doing on RFID-enabled containers. This project had some very interesting potential applications in the field of logistics. The next day, I began asking questions, and Abe put me in contact with his advisor, Professor Olivier de Weck, the head of MIT's Space Logistics Project. Professor de Weck was immediately supportive of the plan Arthur and I built to combine the small logistics carrier and RFID-enabled "smart box" logistics research into a field project at the Mars Desert Research Station. He provided funding for the project (a part of which came from a grant originally given by NASA), and arranged to put us into contact with a company doing a lot of work on the same RFID-enabled container, Aurora Flight Systems (formerly Payload). The company's staff, including Jim Francis and Joe Zapetis, worked closely with Arthur and me to set up and troubleshoot our container design. There were others who worked only with Arthur because I was busy, and it is only fair to acknowledge them here, even though I do not know them myself. Among these was another MIT graduate student with a good feel for computers, named Fabrice Granzotto. The container itself was built in MIT's Hobby Shop, and we had continual feedback and support throughout the project, especially during our first remote testing phase, when Arthur took the container to MDRS for two weeks. I especially also had very good intellectual and moral support from my thesis advisor, Professor Jeff Hoffman, and financial support from the Massachusetts Space Grant organization. It wasn't until all this happened that I even entered the picture here, testing the container in the middle of the desert.

The many contributors I have listed above are just the ones I can remember. I am sure there are others, since one of the most interesting facets of life in the technical world today is that there are few projects that are done in isolation. As one of my textbooks says, no space system was ever designed by a single individual. To work successfully in many fields of engineering today, it is as important to be able to deal well with other people as it is to be technically competent.

As you can clearly see, the project is not my project; I just work on it. I just hope that what I bring back to my supervisors, funders, and associates is useful and insightful for them.