Designing Future Airspace Operations and Lunar Habitat

This seminar will discuss selected ideas related to the intersection of Civil and Environmental Engineering discipline, and Berkeley Space Center’s mission. The speaker will share his research related to air traffic controller workload and their decision support tools, and how those insights changed the paradigm to enable airspace operations of drones. The new “management by exception” paradigm includes digital and cooperative operations supported by third-party service suppliers, as opposed to the current air traffic “management by permission” paradigm. The speaker will further discuss his on-going research about future airspace operations, impact of climate change on air transportation, and aerial wildfire mitigation. In addition, he will introduce an idea of sustainable human habitat on the moon, mars, and in space. In his current research on future airspace operations, the focus is on enabling total system performance to address safety, scalability, efficiency, capacity, and environmental considerations such as noise and emissions. In climate change research, the focus is on understanding the impact of sea level rise, density altitude rise, and extreme weather on airports and airspace. In wildfire mitigation research, the focus is on using drones and airspace management capabilities to remotely conduct aerial suppression of wildfires 24 hours a day which is not possible in today’s paradigm of crewed operations. In sustainable human habitat on the moon, mars and in space, the proposed interdisciplinary, collaborative research will consider disciplines such as human-machine interactions, materials, structures, construction, and systems to manage operations under lower gravity, extreme temperatures, contingencies, static electricity, and lunar dust.

Speaker: Parimal Kopardekar, NASA Aeronautics Research Institute