Georgia Institute of Technology students have won two of the top three awards in a recent American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Foundation contest. The School of Aerospace Engineering groups finished second and third in the 2010-11 Undergraduate Team Space Design Competition. Both were supervised by David Spencer, professor of the practice in Aerospace Engineering, and Carlee Bishop, senior research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

This year’s competition required students to design a spacecraft capable of removing large-sized debris from orbit around the Earth at an altitude between 540-600 miles, and at an inclination between 82 and 83 degrees. Entries also featured a robotic arm capable of placing “deorbiting packs” on individual pieces of debris.

The second-place team, “Team Zodiac,” was comprised of students Eliot Bignell, Luis Reyes Castro, Azariah Cornish, Eric Douglass, Caroline Hilton, Emre Tezcan, and Han Zhang. The third-place team,“Team PACSat,” included students Marco Gomez, Michael Hill, Matt Lee, Garrett Sisk, Alexandra Stavros, Eric Stuber, and Conner Volpe.

AIAA is the world’s largest technical society dedicated to the global aerospace profession. 

Written by Georgia Tech Communications & Marketing Student Media Member Ayesha Patel