A team of New Mexico Tech students working alongside Dr. Andrei Zagrai recently reached a significant milestone in one of their experiments. The group included the following students: Douglas MacNich, Isaac Flores, Matthew Rue, and John Sanchez. The team’s project was called the “In Orbit Structural Health Monitoring of Space Vehicles.” It involved the team designing a payload for a system that would monitor the structural health on the International Space Station (ISS) and be returned with data to be analyzed. The payload they designed was made explicitly for the MISSE-12 platform right outside the ISS, which also houses other space experiments.

Zagrai’s research group tested their structural health monitoring technologies on two suborbital flights. From there, the only thing left to do was to test the monitor in an orbital environment. The team traveled to the Virginia Spaceport to watch their payload take off in a Northrop Grumman Cygnus NG-12 rocket. The  New Mexico Tech experiment then spent about a year on the MISSE-12 platform before being flown back to Earth by a SpaceX CRS-21 Dragon on January 13, 2021. The payload was finally returned to New Mexico Tech in February of 2021 after NASA had conducted their post-flight procedures.

The data obtained from NMT’s pre and post-flight showed the feasibility of structural health monitoring on orbit. However, Dr. Zagrai and his research team are still in the process of analyzing the rest of their data to make results available to a broader scientific community. The team has already presented some of its findings at two international conferences.

New Mexico Tech has multiple ongoing research projects that involve partnerships with NASA. We strive to keep working towards a better tomorrow every day. If you would like to become more involved with the research projects going on at Tech, you can always contact faculty in your department, and they can put you in touch with the right people.