Carbon nanotubes contracts and Mars weather girl

Continuing the ride with our helmets off.

Weight is crucial in exploration. Polar skiers cut their toothbrush down, skilled mountaineers move light and fast.

Space travel is no different and any rocketman worth his salt constantly looks for new ways to shave off some ounces. Among the hottest tools right now for that include generative design, additive manufacturing, and new materials.

At Pythom we work with them all and Gad Reddy, one of our earliest active members, specializes in space-grade Carbon Nanotubes.

This month Gad's NoPo Nanotechnologies won contracts worth around USD 500k with the Indian Navy and US Lockheed Martin for Purified and Metallic Sorted HiPCO® Carbon Nanotubes to provide electromagnetic interference and lightning protection.

The pioneer weather woman

In other team news, we welcome Lana Cohen, our cool Space weather girl.  PhD. in geophysics Lana spent 20 years collecting data and employing instruments in the Arctic and Antarctica.

Expert in field-based geophysical data acquisition and analysis, specializing in atmospheric research, she plays an important role in space-related environmental effects on Pythom's spacecraft designs.

Lana joined us during our work with FAA for the Darpa Launch Challenge.

From ground level all the way up through the atmosphere, a rocket is significantly affected by winds and weather. Those variations must be included for launch safety and trajectory planning.

Lana provided team Pythom with detailed mean winds and variances for each altitude level. We entered the predicted values into our trajectory software and the numbers were simulated in a Monte Carlo model more than a thousand times to find a safe flight path.

In the future, Lana will feed our team up-to-the-minute weather projections during launches. Later, her work will extend to Mars atmosphere with the same basic physics but in a very different environment.

More on Lana's Vortex Science here.