News

Earlier this year, Blue Origin — the spaceflight company formed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2000 — successfully launched its first-ever crewed mission, taking another major step forward in its mission to lower the cost of access to space through reusable spacecraft and rocket engines. For UT alumnus and Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith, the company’s mission represents a full-circle opportunity to provide a new generation with the same inspiration he received from earlier aerospace accomplishments.

A group of Longhorns led by aerospace engineering alumnus Arthur Erickson (B.S. ASE 2017) is working to transform agricultural crop care across the globe with their “AgroDrones.”

Medical sensing technology has taken great strides in recent years, with the development of wearable devices that can track pulse, brain function, biomarkers in sweat and more. 

NASA is gearing up for a mission to land on Jupiter's moon Europa, which houses a deep ocean beneath an icy shell. This mission, which could seek evidence of life on an icy world, is one of a kind, and it's also created a unique opportunity for aerospace and computational engineering undergraduate students.

Pneumonia has emerged as a life-threatening complication of COVID-19, accounting for nearly half of all patients who have died from the novel coronavirus in the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic.

Lori Margruder is playing a crucial role in NASA's ICESat-2 mission which is responsible for taking important measurements of our planet's key health indicators, including ice sheet mass balance, depth of bodies of water, cloud and aerosol heights, land topography and vegetation characteristics.

Turbulent air flows – vortices and eddies – can create challenging problems in the fields of aerospace engineering and transportation. These flows can cause drag on vehicles such as airplanes, spacecraft, trains and trucks, reducing their performance and increasing their fuel consumption.

The aerospace engineering undergraduate program in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has once again been named one of the top programs of its kind in the nation.

Ethics will be at the forefront of robotics education thanks to a new University of Texas at Austin program that will train tomorrow’s technologists to understand the positive — and potentially negative — implications of their creations.

More than half of the U.S. population lives in coastal watershed counties or parishes. Coastal communities along the Gulf of Mexico are among the most heavily populated – also a region where high concentrations of energy resources have made it a national hub for many large-scale carbon-to-capture storage facilities.

Jayant Sirohi has been named a Technical Fellow of the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) for 2021.

Thomas J.R. Hughes has been inducted as an Honorary Member into the Japan Association for Computational Mechanics (JACM).

The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso have signed agreements with the U.S. Space Force to provide advanced research and workforce development for the newest branch of the U.S. armed services. 

Three faculty members in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics have been promoted to the rank of professor, effective Sept. 1, 2021 – Srinivas Bettadpur, Todd Humphreys and Ryan Russell. All have made significant impacts on the department's teaching and research efforts.

Learn more about our newest faculty member, David Fridovich-Keil, who joins us as an assistant professor this fall.