On my first day at NRL, I'm eating lunch in the cafeteria, when I hear, "Dr Reynolds?" It was Yishi Lee, a former undergraduate and masters student at ERAU. He had worked with me on a project concerning radiation in the low-earth-orbit (LEO) environment, and did his thesis with a space physicist titled "A 3D model of the auroral ionosphere." He was more interested in hands-on engineering work, so he's currently in the PhD program at the University of Denver, studying robotics.
Anyway, he got an internship to spend the summer at NRL working in their space robotics lab, and has been doing research on actuators that use shape memory materials, like nickel-titantium. Interestingly, there were a lot of talks on this subject at the PCMI workshop that I attended in Utah in July, because the mathematics describing these materials is quite interesting.
I also got a tour of their lab, and I saw their huge frictionless granite table, used for mimicking the frictionless space environment (although there's still gravity, at least it's force free in two dimensions). Unfortunately, the taking of photos is not allowed at NRL, so Yishi is going to send me an official photo of him and his work. I'll post that when I get it.
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