The Structures, Pointing, And Control
Engineering (SPACE) Center was established in 2003 at the
California
State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) with NASA funding of
$6 million. The Center is composed of two laboratories: the
Structures Pointing and Control Engineering (SPACE) laboratory and
the Multidisciplinary Flight Dynamics and Control (MFDC) laboratory.
The SPACE University Research Center
(URC) works in partnership with
Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC)
as the lead NASA center, and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) as the
secondary NASA center. In addition, the URC has a close
collaboration with Boeing Company and
Northrop Grumman Corporation. The
major areas of research in the URC are directly related to the
missions of the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate
(Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and Combustion) and Exploration
Systems Mission Directorate (James Webb Space Telescope), addressing
and supporting some of these missions’ key challenges.
To address the technology challenges
of both Directorates, the SPACE center conducts research and
development in the following Research Areas:
-
Intelligent Flight Control,
Autonomous Control, Formation Flying
-
Uninhabited Air Vehicles (UAV) Development
-
Wind-Tunnel Testing and Validations
-
Optimization of Combustion and Propulsion Systems
-
Bio-derived Liquid Fuel and Solid Propellant Development
-
Thermal Analysis of Space Systems
-
Space Telescope Technology, Precision Pointing, System
Identification
-
Decentralized Control, Failure Analysis and
Reconfigurable Control
-
Ubiquitous Computing and Embedded Architectures.
The URC shares NASA's
commitment to increasing the number of minority students who will
pursue and earn advanced degrees and become the influential
scientists and engineers of tomorrow.
