Aero Students Sweep Competition at AIAA Conference

A group of twenty-eight undergraduate and graduate aerospace students traveled to the 2010 AIAA Regional I-MA conference in Blacksburg, VA at the campus of Virgina Tech on the weekend of April 9-11. Students presented papers on various research projects and as luck and hard work would have it, the University of Maryland swept the competition, snapping up first and second places in the undergraduate research category as well as first, second and third place in the graduate category. Justin Brannan and a fellow student, for example, presented papers on the two research projects they conducted while at the Mars Desert Research Station(MDRS) and were awarded first place in the Master's category for the development and field testing of the prototype geological toolkit (a potential astronaut hand tool). As a result of the first place award, the research will be presented at the International level next January. Results of the competition (below) illustrate the level of effort and quality of work presented by UMCP aero students: Undergraduate Category: