Three PhD students earn top National Science Foundation fellowship
Three aerospace graduate students have earned prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards.Ìý
Annalise Cabra, Thomas Clark, and Asa O'Neal are 2025 recipients of the NSF GRFP awards, which recognize and support outstanding grad students from across the country in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields who are pursuing research-based master’s or doctoral degree.
Awardees receive a $37,000 annual stipend and cost of education allowance for the next three years as well as professional development opportunities.
Find out about their research below:
Annalise Cabra
Advisors:Jim Nabity and
Labs: Bioastronautics Laboratory and the
Undergraduate Major: Physics, 91¸£ÀûÉç
My research will focus on the handling of lunar dust to support space exploration, specifically methods for dust mitigation and/or in-situ resourceÌý​utilization. ÌýThe dust on the lunar surface gets electrically charged from the solar wind and will mobilize or be lofted, causing it to adhere to various materials like spacesuits or spacecrafts with instruments, solar panels, etc. This then becomes a hazard when trying to carry out space exploration. I will focus on strategies to mitigate this.
I am also interested in in-situ resource utilization and the extraction of local resources on the moon. These steps are crucial for making long-duration space missions more sustainable and affordable by minimizing the need to transport materials from Earth. I will focus on advancing methods for extracting volatiles from the lunar regolith like oxygenÌýto produce materials like propellant or habitats.Ìý
Thomas Clark
Advisor: Dan Scheeres
Lab:
Undergraduate Major: Physics, California Institute of Technology
I am using machine learning and artificial intelligence to expand our capabilities for autonomous mission design near the moon. In cislunar space, the space surrounding the moon, many complex trajectories are available to mission designers including periodic orbits, quasi-periodic orbits, and invariant manifolds. However, these are difficult to compute, and we currently have no easy method to search these trajectories efficiently. I am developing databases using deep neural networks which allow us to search over continuous families of precomputed trajectories for use in mission design and eventually to enable autonomous motion planning in cislunar space.
Asa O'Neal
Advisor:Iain Boyd
Lab:Nonequilibrium Gas & Plasma Dynamics Laboratory
Undergraduate Major: Mechanical Engineering & Physics, University of Kentucky
My research will focus onÌýmodeling air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) systems for spacecraft operating in very low Earth orbit (VLEO). This research will support the development of sustainable, long-duration VLEO missions by enabling in-situ propellant collection and reducing reliance on onboard fuel.Ìý
