Zac Manchester Engineer, Rocket Scientist, Spacecraft Hacker

AIAA SciTech 2017

I just got back from the 2017 AIAA SciTech Conference in Grapevine, Texas. The conference was a great opportunity to learn about a whole bunch of interesting small satellite and UAV work going on around the world. I presented two papers: one on spacecraft inertia estimation that grew out of my PhD work on KickSat, and one on some new micro aerial vehicle (MAV) perching work I’m doing in my postdoc at Harvard. The picture below shows the wind tunnel test rig I built to measure the aerodynamic coefficients (lift, drag, and pitching moment) of our MAV prototypes. Check out the papers and slides from my talks if you’re interested.

Wind Tunnel