Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE190100849
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$364,000.00
Summary
Advanced thermal protection systems to enable Mars return missions. This project aims to advance the modelling of spacecraft heat shield performance to enable future returns to Earth from Mars, where vehicles will encounter heating loads an order of magnitude higher than Lunar returns. Survival depends on sacrificial heat shields which intentionally lose mass through ablation to form a protective layer. Currently, this process cannot be predicted accurately leading to compromised safety, excessi ....Advanced thermal protection systems to enable Mars return missions. This project aims to advance the modelling of spacecraft heat shield performance to enable future returns to Earth from Mars, where vehicles will encounter heating loads an order of magnitude higher than Lunar returns. Survival depends on sacrificial heat shields which intentionally lose mass through ablation to form a protective layer. Currently, this process cannot be predicted accurately leading to compromised safety, excessive weight, and increased mission cost. The expected outcome is an ablation model for vehicle design which, for the first time, is based on experiments with a realistic aerodynamic flow. The significance and benefit of this project is its potential to make ambitious missions such as a Mars return feasible.Read moreRead less
A fast comparative method for historical linguistics. Linguists are able to infer ancient histories of languages by a procedure known as the Comparative Method. Its results are used in related studies of human genetic and cultural change. However, the Comparative Method is a manual-only process and thus currently is a bottleneck for the science of unravelling the human past. This project aims to overcome this limitation and significantly accelerate linguistic discovery, by combining recent advan ....A fast comparative method for historical linguistics. Linguists are able to infer ancient histories of languages by a procedure known as the Comparative Method. Its results are used in related studies of human genetic and cultural change. However, the Comparative Method is a manual-only process and thus currently is a bottleneck for the science of unravelling the human past. This project aims to overcome this limitation and significantly accelerate linguistic discovery, by combining recent advances in computational language processing, statistics and cultural-evolutionary modelling. By producing innovative mathematical means for rapidly discovering ancient language relationships, it will enable a breakthrough in our capacity to uncover human linguistic, genetic and cultural heritage worldwide.Read moreRead less