AME and ASTE students took first and second place in the team division and first and second place in the individual division for undergraduate and graduate papers. The students competed against schools across the West Coast.
The 1st place Undergraduate Team winners, Kylar Flynn, Gabriel Goldman, Connor Storey, and Jose Torres, presented their work on the experimental construction and testing of a FEEP thruster using Gallium for propellant. Gallium is an advantageous propellant due to its low melting temperature and low toxicity. These students built and tested their thruster in the ASPEN vacuum chamber in the Baum Family Maker Space and used plasma diagnostics to confirm their predicted performance.
The 2nd place Undergraduate Team winners, Yashvi Deliwala, Amanda Lucker, Jacquelin Nguyen, and Audrey Park presented their work on shape memory alloy tiers for Mars exploration. Their project explored the design and testing of a superelastic tire suited for space exploration using Nitinol springs to enhance the rover tire’s performance on harsh extraterrestrial terrains.
The 2nd place Graduate winner, Jonathan Messer – a PhD student in the USC Department of Astronautical Engineering – is adapting a technology originally found in movie theater projectors, for the purpose of allowing satellites to save fuel and last longer in space. His paper, “Initial Parametric Design of a Torsion Pendulum to Demonstrate Attitude Control Using Microoptomechanical System Control of Radiation Pressure,” involved designing an experiment to demonstrate his research studying satellite attitude control using digital
The 1st place Undergraduate winner, Nicholas Lotosky, a junior majoring in aerospace engineering, presented their independent research on modeling a “Gliding Turn-Back” Maneuver. The project developed a numerical model of the “impossible turn,” a gliding turn-back maneuver flown when an engine fails shortly after takeoff in a single-engine, fixed-wing aircraft.
In addition to these groups, USC has sent various other student teams from AME 441 Senior Projects and the ASPEN lab. USC’s success at this event continues with over ten straight years of podium finishes by seniors. The winners of the 2025 competition will go to the national competition at the AIAA Scitech meeting in Orlando in January 2026.
Published on April 9th, 2025
Last updated on April 9th, 2025
