News Log

2024

• December 28^th, 2024: Our first journal article associated with the DARPA Zenith program was published today in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems.
• December 13^th, 2024: Congratulations to Matthias Kura on successfully defending his semester MS thesis at the Technical University of Munich! Prof. Gisela Detrell and Prof. Romero-Calvo co-advised Matthias’ work on magnetic phase separation for microalgae applications in microgravity.
• December 12^th, 2024: The International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer published today Dr. Sam Hart’s latest journal article on liquid metal heat transport for high-power CubeSat applications. Evan Sánchez is currently exploring this concept for hypersonic reentry vehicles.
• December 6^th, 2024: Sam Hart and Reyouf Alotaibi presented this week their work at the ASGSR Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This was a great opportunity to reconnect with the microgravity science community!
• December 2^nd, 2024: Congratulations to Luca Scifoni and Francesco Isidori Pacelli for successfully defending their MS theses. Their work on active lunar dust mitigation will make us walk again on the Moon!
• November 8^th, 2024: Congratulations to Dr. Samuel Hart for successfully defending his PhD thesis, Thermoelectromagnetic Fluid Management in Microgravity! He will join SpaceX to work on the Starship ECLSS team next January. Way to go, Sam!
• November 8^th, 2024: Congratulations to Shay Vitale on landing one of the highly competitive IMS Facility Seed Grants for his MS project Manufacture of a Diamagnetically Enhanced PEM Electrolysis Cell!
• October 31^st, 2024: Our lab just completed the first parabolic flight campaign with the NASA TechFlights program! Boarding Zero G Corp’s G-Force One was a truly exhilarating experience. Looking forward to the next one!
• October 24^th, 2024: Congrats to Reyouf Alotaibi for passing her MS proposal on liquid droplet radiators!
• September 6^th, 2024: Congrats to Francesco Maria Isidori Pacelli for passing his MS proposal on flexible electrodynamic dust shielding!
• August 23^rd, 2024: Congrats to Luca Scifoni for passing his MS proposal on electrodynamic dust mitigation!
• August 9^th, 2024: Congrats to Theo St. Francis for winning the ARCS Scholars Award!
• July 29^th, 2024: Fun YouTube podcast on low-gravity with Fraser Cain! See more at https://youtu.be/fnKwzi7nvOU?si=wZrknt_HrPXvlCIT
• July 21^st, 2024: Fun LGST Lab field trip to the 53^rd International Conference on Environmental Systems in Louisville, KY. Sam Hart, Theo St. Francis, and Shay Vitale presented multiple papers on heat transfer, life support, and phase separation in low gravity.
• July 23^rd, 2024: Romain Fonteyne gave a presentation on our lunar dust mitigation work at the NASA Exploration Science Forum in St. Louis, MO.
• July 13^th, 2024: Our group gave four presentations this week at the 2024 COSPAR Scientific Assembly in Busan, South Korea, in collaboration with Prof. Katharina Brinkert’s group at the ZARM Institute in Bremen.
• June 16^th, 2024: This week, we presented several papers at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference in Yokohama! They are the first publications resulting from our DARPA Zenith grant with Honeywell Aerospace.
• May 15^th, 2024: Tatsuyoshi Kurumiya has joined the LGST Lab to support our NASA NIAC project on low-gravity magnetohydrodynamic water electrolysis over the summer. He will be working with Theo St. Francis as part of the Georgia Tech SURE program. Welcome to the lab, Tatsu!
• May 1^st, 2023: Today, Dr. Romero-Calvo was elected vice-chair of the AIAA Microgravity and Space Processes Technical Committee (MSPTC).
• April 25^th, 2024: Congrats to Taylor Hampson and Spencer Baird for being selected to join the CREATE-X Startup Launch 2024 summer program! They will initiate the commercialization of the magnetohydrodynamic liquid metal technology developed by the LGST lab.
• April 23^rd, 2024: R. Fonteyne is presenting the LGST Lab’s work on lunar dust mitigation today at the LSIC Spring Meeting in Laurel, MD, also on behalf of F. Isidori-Pacelli and L. Scifoni.
• April 4^th, 2024: Congratulations to Eric Comstock and Theo St. Francis for receiving the 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship! The program will support their research in magnetohydrodynamic Air-Breathing Electric Propulsion (ABEP) and multiphase mass transport in low-gravity water electrolysis. 
• April 4^th, 2024: New conference paper at the 2024 Region II AIAA Student Conference at Kennedy Space Center. The publication, named “Magnetic Field Mapper Using Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) Components“, is led by our undergraduate student Yubo Fu.
• April 1^st, 2024: Read more about Francesco Isidori Pacelli’s journey in this post from the Georgia Tech Europe campus!
• March 27^th, 2024: Dr. Romero-Calvo is presenting our NASA NIAC magnetohydrodynamic electrolysis work today at the Georgia Tech Energy Materials Day.
• February 26^th, 2024: NASA has selected our SmallSat magnetic positive positioning technology as part of the TechFlights 2023 cohort! Excited to fly our demonstrators onboard Zero Gravity Corp.’s parabolic plane.
• February 8^th, 2024: Our grad students R. Fonteyne, F. Isidori-Pacelli, and L. Scifoni are presenting their work on lunar dust mitigation through electrodynamic dust shielding at the ExplOrigins 2024 Colloquium in Atlanta.
• February 6^th, 2024: New conference paper at the 2024 AAS Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference in Breckenridge, CO. The publication, named “Open-Source Propellant Sloshing Modeling and Simulation“, is led by our undergraduate student Brian González.
• January 19^th, 2024: Congrats to Samuel Hart, Evan Sanchez, and Hadi Malik for publishing their paper “Neutral Buoyancy Testing of Low-Gravity Fluid Management” in the AIAA Journal!
• January 11^th, 2024: Congrats to Samuel T. Hart for winning the Best Small Satellite Student Paper Award at the 2024 AIAA SciTech Conference! He presented his paper “Leveraging Phase Change for CubeSat Propellant Positioning“. Interview here.
• January 5^th, 2024: Today, NASA announced the selection of our low-gravity magnetohydrodynamic water electrolysis technology for a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Phase I study. Excited to work on this new project! Read the full history here.
• January 4^th, 2024: This semester, we welcome Theo St. Francis, Francesco Isidori Pacelli, and Luca Scifoni to the LGST Lab! They will be working on low-gravity water electrolysis and lunar dust mitigation. Read more about them here and here!

2023

• December 19^th, 2023: Our Magnetically-Enhanced Electrolysis experiment flew today onboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard 24 mission. Data is looking great! Watch the webcast here.
• November 18^th, 2023: Today, the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research awarded the Thora Halstead Young Investigator Award to Dr. Romero-Calvo at the closing ceremony of the 2023 ASGSR Meeting in Washington, DC. Full story here.
• November 13th, 2023: Congratulations to Samuel T. Hart for publishing his first leading-author journal article in Acta Astronautica!
• October 27^th, 2023: Congratulations to Samuel T. Hart for successfully proposing his Ph.D. thesis this Friday!
• October 14^th, 2023: Interested in UV lasers and spacecraft charging? Make sure to check our latest paper at IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science
• October 13^th, 2023: Thanks to Monique Wadell and the AE Communications Office for featuring our work as part of the Hispanic Heritage Month!
• August 21^st, 2023: Our lab is now one year old, and what better way to celebrate it than welcoming our new graduate students Hugh Chen, Romain Fonteyne, and Tianyang Hu? Read more about them here and here!
• August 15^th, 2023: Congratulations to Eric Comstock for winning the APS travel award to attend the 65^th APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting in Denver, CO, this winter!
• August 11^th, 2023: Our AE-4342 Space Systems Design teams TRTL and COAST ended up 1^st and 3^rd at the AIAA Undergraduate Space Design competition! Congrats on a job well done, and good luck presenting at AIAA ASCEND! Read the full story here.
• July 14^th, 2023: Congratulations to Brian González and Shay Vitale for landing the Georgia Tech President’s Undergraduate Research Salary Award (PURA)!
• June 14^th, 2023: Prof. Katharina Brinkert’s group at the University of Warwick and the LGST lab are looking for a PostDoc to support our ESA SciSpace low-gravity water electrolysis project. More details are in our Opportunities section!
• June 12^th, 2023: Congratulations to team LOTUS for winning the Best Technical Paper award at the RASC-AL competition! Full story here.
• May 30^th, 2023: Dr. Romero-Calvo has received the Young Author’s Award for Excellent Paper for his invited talk “Leveraging Magnetohydrodynamic Mechanisms for Stable and Efficient Microgravity Electrolysis” at the 243^rd Electrochemical Society Meeting in Boston, MA.
• May 26^th, 2023: The LGST Lab is looking for a PostDoc for a research project on ferrohydrodynamics. More details are in our Opportunities section!
• May 14^th, 2023: Dr. Romero-Calvo received an honorable mention for his Ph.D. thesis work “Novel Electromagnetic Space Applications: Electron-Based Touchless Potential Sensing & Low-Gravity Magnetohydrodynamics” at the International Contest of Ph.D. theses in the field of Magnetic Fluids awarded by the International Steering Committee on Magnetic Fluids.
• April 21^st, 2023: Congrats to Eric Comstock for winning the Goizueta Foundation Fellowship! Fellowship recipients bring exemplary levels of scholarship and innovation to the academic departments that host their study and research.
• April 11^th, 2023: Our AE-4342 Space Systems Design students just became finalists in the NASA RASC-AL competition! Read the full announcement here.
• April 8^th, 2023: Thanks to ASGSR Students for their kind invitation to present our work at their webinar series! The recording is available on their Youtube channel.
• March 27^th, 2023: Macià Monfort-Castillo presented today his conference paper “Magnetohydrodynamic Drive for Water-Based CubeSat Propulsion” at the AIAA Region II Student Conference in Knoxville, TN. You can watch his presentation here.
• February 28^th, 2023: Fantastic day at the 2023 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) at Broomfield, CO! You can take a look at our abstract on magnetically enhanced electrolysis here.
• February 7^th, 2023: Today, Sam Hart presented his conference paper “Capillary and Electromagnetic SmallSat Propellant Positioning” at the 45th Rocky Mountain AAS GN&C Conference at Breckenridge, CO. You can listen to his presentation here and take a look at his work here!
• February 1^st, 2023: New guest article by Dr. Romero-Calvo at AAS Space Times on the future of the field of low-gravity fluid mechanics and the opportunities brought by Artemis.
• January 9^th, 2023: The LGST Lab is partnering with Prof. Katharina Brinkert’s Group at the University of Warwick in the development of next-generation oxygen and hydrogen production devices. Our ESA-sponsored suborbital rocket experiment will test an autonomously operating, efficient, and monolithic solar water-splitting device for oxygen and hydrogen production in microgravity. More info here.
• January 3^rd, 2023: We welcome Eric Comstock to the LGST Lab as our latest Ph.D. student! Eric will research the application of magnetohydrodynamic forces to a variety of entry, descent, and landing problems.

2022

• December 1^st, 2022: Our research on magnetic phase separation in microgravity was highlighted today in Aerospace America’s 2022 year-in-review! More info here.
• November 15^th, 2022: Dr. Romero-Calvo has won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the College of Engineering of the University of Colorado Boulder. This award recognizes the best dissertation (excellence of research, topical importance, and presentation in the written dissertation) among students completing Ph.D. degree requirements during a calendar year. More info here.
• November 10^th, 2022: Today, Dr. Romero-Calvo was elected as a member of the ASGSR Board for a 3-year term at the ASGSR Meeting 2022 in Houston, TX. More info here.
• October 27^th, 2022: Congratulations to the LGST Lab undergraduate researchers working on the design of the Georgia Tech Microgravity Drop Tower!! This afternoon they delivered an amazing poster presentation and won 1^st place in the hardware and devices division of the VIP Innovation Showcase. More info here.
• October 26^th, 2022: Our research on magnetic phase separation was featured today on the website of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers! More info here.
• October 13^th, 2022: Our article “Novel Propellant Settling Strategies for Liquid Rocket Engine Restart in Microgravity” has been published today in Acta Astronautica! doi: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2022.10.012
• October 4^th, 2022: This week, Dr. Romero-Calvo was appointed as Vice-Chair of the COSPAR Scientific Commission G: Material and Fluid Sciences in Space Conditions. More info here.
• October 3^rd, 2022: Listen here to a fireside chat on our last paper on magnetic phase separation in microgravity at Quantum Photonics Club. Link to the paper.
• September 14^th, 2022: Coming back from Blue Origin’s NS-23 launch campaign in the desert today. We had a blast!
• August 18^th, 2022: Our latest journal article on magnetic phase separation in microgravity has been featured in numerous media outlets this last week. Read the full story in Popular Science!
• August 13^th, 2022: Press releases for our recent npj Microgravity article have been published by the University of Warwick and ZARM (in German), triggering a significant response in mass media. Thanks to both of them for their amazing support!
• August 8^th, 2022: Our article “Magnetic Phase Separation in Microgravity” has been published this morning in npj Microgravity! Read this nice press release by Jeff Zehnder at CU Boulder for further details. doi: 10.1038/s41526-022-00212-9
• August 6^th, 2022: Our article “Fully Coupled Interface-Tracking Model For Axisymmetric Ferrohydrodynamic Flows” has been published this morning in Applied Mathematical Modeling! Read it for free here until September 25. doi: 10.1016/j.apm.2022.06.046
• August 4^th, 2022: The LGST Lab is looking for two new Ph.D. students to lead research projects in low-gravity electrolysis and low-gravity positive positioning. More details are in our Opportunities section!
• August 1^st, 2022: Today the Low-Gravity Science and Technology Lab is born! We will keep this website updated with the latest news and events. Stay tuned 🚀