Aeronautics & Astronautics

The Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP) is a ten week summer research opportunity for undergraduate Juniors & Seniors, and Graduate students, under the guidance of a mentor, at a participating Navy Laboratory (list of participating universities is available at http://www.asee.org/nreip). The stipend amounts for the program are $7500 for undergraduate students and $10,000 for graduate students. U.S. citizenship required; Permanent residents accepted at certain labs.

The New Media Team at NASA Ames Research Center has developed the first NASA iPhone application to deliver up-to-the-minute NASA content directly from Agency sources in one easy-to-use mobile platform. The software makes extensive use of built-in iPhone features and usability to offer NASA information in a clear and intuitive way. The application aggregates and delivers a compelling range of dynamically updated information, images and video links. The NASA App is available free of charge on the App Store from Apple directly to the iPhone and iPod Touch or within iTunes.

The Durand-Lesley propellers in the Engineering Library are the surviving artifacts of a famous experiment in early aviation history which defined a process method in engineering research still in use today.

The work created a comprehensive methodology that was widely used by engineers but little studied by historians, until Walter G. Vincenti wrote about it as a case study in his book, “What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History” (1993).

The Durand-Lesley propeller studies at Stanford were an attempt to determine the best performance of various propeller shapes by systematically altering parameters over the course of the experiments. The variable parameters were the five qualities that defined the shape of propeller blades, and two others - the speed of the airstream and the speed of propeller rotation.

NASA has chosen Michael S. Hopkins, an alumnus of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, to be one of its newest astronauts. Of the nine-member class, two others are also alumni of Stanford University. For a full list of the 2009 astronaut candidate class with photos and bios click here: http://www.nasa.gov/astronauts/ascans2009.html

The NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program, which is administered by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) is officially accepting applications for the 2010 Aeronautics Scholarship Program. It is expected that approximately 20 two-year undergraduate, and 5 two-year with an option of a third year graduate scholarships will be awarded annually to students pursuing aeronautical engineering and related fields such as Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Physics and Mathematics.

NASA is offering undergraduate students an opportunity to test experiments in microgravity aboard NASA's reduced gravity aircraft.

The opportunity is part of NASA's Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program, which gives aspiring explorers a chance to propose, design, and fabricate a reduced-gravity experiment. Selected teams will test and evaluate their experiment aboard NASA's reduced-gravity airplane. The aircraft flies about 30 roller-coaster-like climbs and dips during experiment flights to produce periods of weightlessness and hypergravity ranging from 0 g to 2 g.

Stanford Dissertations and Theses
The Engineering Library shelves print copies of dissertations and theses for the two most recent years only. Earlier print dissertations and theses are shelved off site and can be requested via Socrates.

Electronic theses
Free downloading of full text PDF versions is available for Stanford dissertations (for Stanford users only) from the year 1989 forward are available from Dissertations & theses @ Stanford University, hosted by UMI.

More information

The world's first piloted aircraft capable of manned flight using only power from hydrogen fuel cells took off in Germany Tuesday. Developed by the German Aerospace Center, the Antares DLR-H2 is based on the Antares 20E motor glider with a wingspan of 20 meters, it has a range of 750 km and can currently reach speeds up to 170 km/hr.

"The fuel cell is slung under the left wing and the hydrogen tank under the right wing – with a capacity of either 2 or 4.9 kilograms. The fuel cell system used to power the Antares delivers up to 25 kilowatts of electrical power, and when flying in a straight line, the aircraft only requires about ten kilowatts of power. In this situation, the fuel cell is operating at an efficiency level of approximately 52 percent."

This list includes those databases used most by engineering students and faculty. A more complete list of science and engineering databases is available, or consult the full list of databases available at Stanford.

ACM Digital Library
The ACM Digital Library includes the full text of every article published by ACM, including archives.

AIAA Digital Library

Attention MathCAD Users

Knovel will soon be featuring live Mathcad enabled equations in select titles starting with Roark's Formulas for Stress and Strain and Hick's Handbook of Civil Engineering Calculations

SF Bay Area ACM Data Mining SIG

Using Supervised and Unsupervised Learning to Detect and Isolate Faults in Rocket Engines

Speaker: Mark Schwabacher, NASA Ames Research Center

Date: April 8, 2009 (Wednesday), 6:30PM

Venue: SAP Labs, Building 1 (previously known as “Building D”), 3410 Hillview Ave, Palo Alto, CA (Directions)

Cost: FREE and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20 annually

Topics Details:

Photo: METEOTEK IES LA BISBAL SCHOOL via FLICKR

Using only a digital camera, some sensors, and a large helium balloon, a group of high school students from IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia, Spain were able to capture photos of earth and space up to nearly 100,000 feet. They had hoped to reach only 30,000 ft. Using an onboard radio receiver the team was able to track the balloon's progress on Google Earth.

News Webpages:

• Stanford University, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics News


• NASA News

Categorized RSS Subscription Pages:

• Aviation Week

Recommended Handbooks and Encyclopedias:

• Aerospace Source Book

The following are suggested starting points for finding Airfoil Data

Online sources of material property information provide interactive tools to discover the mechanical, thermophysical, electrical properties of alloys, composites, ceramics adhesives and others:

• Aerospace Structural Materials Database (ASMD)

Some databases, like IEEE/IEE Library, contain full-text articles. However, many of the databases you can use to find journal articles are called Abstracting and Indexing databases because they contain citation information, such as author, journal, publication date, the abstract of the article, etc.

This citation information can be used to help locate the full-text in the following ways:

Full-text access to AIAA Journal, Journal of Aircraft, Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, Journal of Propulsion and Power, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, and meeting papers.

An international, multidisciplinary index to the literature of science, technology, and biomedicine. Over 4,000 journals representing all scientific disciplines are indexed. The database covers 1900 to the present, and records from January 1991 to the present include abstracts. Cited reference searching is a valuable feature of the database. Science citation index expanded and is available via ISI Web of Knowledge/Web of Science.

Provides a comprehensive index to the published literature in physics, electrical/electronic engineering, computing, control engineering, information technology, production, manufacturing and mechanical engineering as well as materials science, oceanography, nuclear engineering, geophysics, biomedical engineering and biophysics. Coverage begins in 1898

Provides full-image access to the publications of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE); includes all journals, magazines, standards and conference proceedings.

A free federated vertical search portal for 21 professional scholarly societies. Content sources include: three million articles and conference proceedings 50 million patents from the world's major patent offices full-text documents from the US Dept of Energy Information Bridge site