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²ÊÃñ±¦µä aerospace students have earned high honors in the 2020 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Region V Student Paper competition.

Senior design teams from the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences earned first and third place in the competition, which is typically part of an in-person conference that was cancelled due to the coronavirus.

Organizers initially cancelled the paper competition as well, but encouraged students to submit their papers anyway, for professional feedback. The judges ultimately decided to announce awards from those entries, with two ²ÊÃñ±¦µä teams taking high honors:

• 1st Place: Team EMU - The EMU team's original project was to design a fully autonomous, 25 lb, multirotor UAS capable of completing long duration flight while supporting a 5 lb payload and streaming video.
• 3rd Place: Team NanoSAM -Working with Ball Aerospace, the team's original project was to design, construct, and test a functioning optics system capable of measuring solar irradiance in a narrow spectral band around 1.02 um to obtain stratospheric aerosol concentrations data. An accompanying electronics system will also be produced for the purpose of collecting, packetizing, and outputting irradiance data.

As first place finishers, EMU advances to compete at the international AIAA SciTech Forum in January 2021.