Facilities

The LGST Lab is part of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. As an R1 research institution, Georgia Tech fosters a collaborative research environment supported by extensive institutional support, including shared computational resources, machine and electronics shop infrastructure and training, micro/nanomanufacturing facilities, and interdisciplinary spaces. Our laboratory is distributed across the aerospace engineering buildings on campus.

Hardware Laboratory

Hardware laboratory at the LGST Lab

Situated at Georgia Tech’s Weber building, our 500 ft2 hardware laboratory is where we carry out most of our experimental work. It hosts:

  • A wet chemistry area with a 120+ fpm fume hood, acid/base storage lockers, syringe pumps, microscopes, optical goniometers, and chemically resistant surfaces.
  • Rapid prototyping equipment, including a Bambu Lab H2D printer, a Form Labs 3B resin 3D printer with its curing station, an electronics shop with UV curing and soldering stations, a vibration-isolated optical table, and supporting electronics.
  • A spherical, 12-inch diameter vacuum chamber facility designed to carry out lunar dust dynamics and mitigation studies. The chamber uses a two-stage pumping system, combining a Scroll Labs SVF-E2-100 pump and an Agilent TwisTorr 305 FS turbomolecular pump, to achieve ultra-high vacuum conditions. With 11 radial ports, it supports a variety of experimental setups thanks to extensive support equipment, including a dust-dispensing device, a vacuum-compatible Hamamatsu L10706 UV lamp, high and low-voltage power supplies, and signal generators.
  • Three high-performance computers with up to 64 cores, 256 Gb RAM, and 48 Gb NVIDIA GPUs for parallel computing. Our software suites include COMSOL Multiphysics, SIMION, MATLAB, ANSYS, LabVIEW, and SolidWorks. In addition, our lab has access to Georgia Tech’s Partnership for Advanced Computing Environment (PACE). This shared facility provides 2,000 CPU/GPU nodes, over 47,000 cores, and 9+ petabytes of storage, supporting large-scale simulations and data processing.

Student Offices

Located in the Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM) building, our office space hosts up to 26 graduate students from the Space Systems Design Laboratory (SSDL). Each student has an individual desk and computer. A conference room is available on the same floor.

Drop tower

Our group is currently designing the largest microgravity drop tower in the Southeast United States. When completed, it will transform Georgia Tech into one of the very few institutions in the world with access to microgravity conditions.

The drop tower will be located inside the high bay at the Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions (CNES) Laboratory at Georgia Tech’s North Avenue Research Area. With a total height of 10.5 m, the tower will provide up to 300 1.4 s drops per day, enabling high-quality research and education on campus. We will use this facility to unveil a wide range of fundamental physical phenomena to design more efficient and reliable space technologies, from spacecraft propellant management to deployable structures.

Future location of the LGST Lab drop tower