Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: First European mission to the moon
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (333) · September 27th, 2008 · Add a Comment
Today in History – September 27, 2003 – The first European mission to the moon was launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket carrying the SMART-1 exploration probe, along with two commercial satellites. It took 15 months to reach lunar orbit, covered over 60 million miles with only 13 gallons of fuel. After being captured by lunar gravity in November 2004, the 170-lb probe scanned the Moon for over 30 months to gain more information about the chemical composition of the Moon and whether it contains water. Powered by a revolutionary new “ion drive”, a solar-powered engine, its cost was only £70 million, much less expensive than that of U.S. space missions. The SMART-1 crashed into lunar soil in September 2006 at the end of its successful mission. The image in the upper right is an artist’s impression of the trajectory of the SMART-1 spacecraft in the final phase of its mission.
Interested readings may want to read Arianne Agogino Gieringer’s blog of December 24 on the first Ariane rocket launch. As she points out, the Ariane rocket continues to be one of the premier commercial satellite launching systems in the world today.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on the SMART-1 mission, rockets and aerospace engineering. For curricular resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education community site.
Also on this date in history in 1816, the first Stirling engine is patented. And in 1910 a key patent is issued for the production of ammonia by Frtiz Haber and Robert Le Rossingnol.
This patent could produce ammonia on a large scale directly from its component gases of hydrogen and nitrogen. Fritz Haber (right photo above) went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this invention in 1918.
For curricular resources, visit the Mechanical Engineering Education and Chemical Engineering Education community sites.
Tags: Aerospace Engineering · Chemical, Biochemical, Biomolecular Engineering · Engineering Mechanics · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Mechanical Engineering
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