Shrihari “Shri” Sankarasubramanian

His grant, the second he has received from NASA, is for the development of an electrochemical process to separate hydrogen and oxygen from ice found in craters on the dark side of the moon and beneath the Martian soil.

“My proposal is to split the ice into hydrogen and oxygen using an electrolyzer — a device that uses electricity directly to carry out chemical reactions,” Sankarasubramanian said. “Hydrogen could be used as fuel and oxygen for astronaut survival.”

He’s working with a Massachusetts company that has experience making electrolyzers, which is what Sankarasubramanian would need for his proposal.

“Giner Labs has a nearly 40-year history with NASA,” he said. “I’m working with them, which will allow us to get relevant preliminary data for the month.”

Wu Hoang

In the College of Science, Hoang and his team lend their research expertise to better understand the behavior of liquids in vacuum. Astronauts must occasionally eject fuel and other liquids safely into space, so this research helps increase the amount of time astronauts can spend on missions.

Hoang collaborates Sean Roberson, David Cantu, Gavin Cunningham and Josiah Sparksall graduates from the Department of Mathematics. Their project is titled “Hydrodynamic stability of jets via neural networks” and combines state-of-the-art tools from machine learning with hydrodynamics.

“Liquids in space can behave in ways that are strange and counterintuitive to what scientists on Earth observe,” Hoang said. “For example, when released into the vacuum of space, fluids can evaporate and freeze at the same time.”