Publications & Conferences
Over the years, as part of our mission to help students develop their skills and share our findings with the engineering community, ASPEN has attended numerous conferences and published several papers. Click any of the links below to download our papers or conference presentations.
Asteria Campaign
Since 2022, ASPEN has been working on developing an electric propulsion thruster for CubeSat applications. For the latest updates on this project, visit the Asteria Project page.
AIAA Region VI Conference 2025
IEPC 2024
AIAA Region VI Conference 2024
GEC 2023
Hyperion Campaign
The Hyperion Campaign was an ASPEN project that ran from 2018 to 2023, focused on modeling a solid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine with an inductively heated, additively manufactured metallic core. The development campaign for Hyperion-1 consisted of three phases of modeling and hardware testing. Experimental data from each phase was compared to corresponding linked multiphysics models in ANSYS. Three test articles, starting with a single tube and culminating in a fully printed core, were tested with gaseous nitrogen in an inductive heating environment that simulated the nuclear fission occurring in true solid-core nuclear thermal engines.