On Titan, Saturn's largest moon, most of the surface terrain is plains. Although plains are so prevelant on Titan, we have a poor understanding of their basic properties. The science questions we are asking are relatively basic! What is the ground made of? How are the plains formed? In this paper, I made a robust estimate of the surface composition of Titan's plains using RADAR modeling techniques with data collected by the Cassini satellite.

The Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) was a NASA mission to test an experimental heatshield for use on Mars. During the test, the instrumentation to record LOFTID's trajectory broke, making analysis of the mission very difficult. I invented a system to reconstruct the trajectory of the LOFTID mission using videos from on-board cameras of the Earth and Moon. The system used computer vision algorithms, live orbital tracking of the Earth and Moon, and a custom-built Kalman filter to synthesize the camera and orbital data into a reconstructed trajectory.

I was playing around with origami when I had the idea for this inflatable twisting actuator. In my last two weeks with the Gat Research Group at the Technion I had the idea, did some back-of-the-napkin math to show it could work, and rapidly prototyped with Ezra Ben-Abu to develop and test a working model. I returned to my studies at Cornell, but the lab developed the idea for the next two years and published a paper on the device in 2024. They found that the simple design allowed the actuator to be made very, very small. With an inner radius of just 44 µm it is the smallest inflatable multistable actuator ever made, and is being developed for use in a catheter for robotic surgery!