Editors Department Head Jaime Peraire peraire@mit.edu
Associate Head Karen Willcox kwillcox@mit.edu
Editor & Director of Communications William T.G. Litant wlitant@mit.edu
AeroAstro is published annually by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 33-240, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. http://aeroastro.mit.edu AeroAstro No. 10, July 2013 ©2013 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. DESIGN Opus Design www.opusdesign.us Cover: Aboard NASA’s C-9 Reduced Gravity Research Program aircraft, Professor Dava Newman performs the Man Vehicle Lab’s MICR0-G experiment, an investigation of zero gravity crew reactions. To the left is grad student Phil Ferguson and to the right is Professor Karen Willcox. MVL researchers were quantifying astronaut push off and landing loads, and measuring adaptation to the weightless environment in terms of motor control strategies and adaptation. The lead author of a paper on the research (Stirling, L., Willcox, K., Ferguson, P., Newman, D.J., “Kinetics and Kinematics for Translational Motions in Microgravity During Parabolic Flight,” Journal of Aviation, Space Environmental Medicine, vol. 80, No. 6, pp. 522-531, 2009) was grad student Leia Stirling who has since joined AeroAstro as an assistant professor. (NASA) The Man Vehicle Lab recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. See “The Man Vehicle Lab at 50” on page 55.
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