Sara Miller

The scholarship of first-year AE graduate student Sara Miller has been recognized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) with the 2018  Aerospace Power Systems Best Student Paper award.

Miller and her co-authors (all full-time NASA employees) were selected by AIAA's Aerospace Power Systems Technical Committee (APSTC) for their work in producing the technical paper, “The SPACE Computer Code for Analyzing the International Space Station Electrical Power System: Past, Present, and Future.” The team will officially receive the honor in August during AIAA Propulsion & Energy Forum, to be held in Indianapolis.

The paper gives a long-term overview of the contributions made by SPACE - a powerful computer code first written to support the International Space Station (ISS).

"The System Power Analysis for Capability Evaluation (SPACE) that was first written by engineers at NASA Glenn in the 1980s has since been adapted to analyze the electrical power systems of a wide array of current and future NASA missions such as Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle, Artemis / Gateway, and  Mars surface missions," said Miller, who is currently interning at NASA Glenn where she is supporting the Gateway Power & Propulsion Element (PPE), the International Space Station (ISS) Soyuz flights 60S and 61S; and an advanced concepts design team called COMPASS.

Sara Miller earned her bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering in December of 2017 and is currently enrolled in the AE School's graduate program where she is advised by Prof. Mitchell L. R. Walker and is focusing on plasma-surface interactions and the development of high thrust-to-power ratio devices.