When
Thursday, February 19, 2026, at 4:00 p.m.
Sergio Pellegrino
Director, Graduate Aerospace Laboratories
Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering
Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist
Co-Director, Space-Based Solar Power Project
California Institute of Technology
"Conceiving, Designing and Testing Ultralight Space Structures"
AME Lecture Hall, Room S202 | Zoom link
Abstract: We are working towards new kinds of deployable spacecraft structures that can be tightly packaged and robustly deployed, to provide low-cost, very large solar arrays and RF antennas for wireless power transfer. The packaging concept is origami inspired. The structural concept is based on tape-measure-like, longerons connected by thin rods. They form elastically-coilable, lightweight frames that are filled with thin membranes supporting photovoltaic cells and RF antennas. The structural design is driven by the requirements that the structures should be able to deploy into their intended, flat configuration and should have sufficient stiffness to allow dynamic maneuvers to be carried out without exciting any flexible modes of vibration. The deployment of a meter-scale proof-of-concept physical model has been demonstrated in low earth orbit and useful lessons were learnt about the differences between testing in the lab vs. testing in zero-g.
Bio: Sergio Pellegrino is director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering at Caltech, JPL senior research scientist, and co-director of the Caltech Space Solar Power Project. He is an editor of the International Journal of Solids and Structures, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of AIAA. Among other awards, he has received a Pioneers' Award in 2002 from the Space Structures Research Center, University of Surrey, NASA Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement Team Awards in 2009 and 2016, and the IASS Torroja Medal in 2022.