If there is a limit to Sydney Dolan’s actions, it is his intense belief in being a good steward – both in space and on Earth.
As a graduate student at MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) Dolan is developing a model aimed at mitigating satellite collisions. They perceive space as a public good, a resource available to everyone. “There is a real concern that if enough collisions occur, the entire orbit could potentially be desecrated,” they say. “We have to be very careful about trying to maintain people’s access to be able to use the space for the different uses that it currently has.”
Here on the Blue Planet, Dolan is passionate about building community and ensuring students in this department have what they need to succeed. To this end, they were deeply involved in mentoring other students; running and participating in sympathy groups for women and the LGBTQ+ community; and creating communication resources to support students navigate high school.
Entering fresh territories
Dolan’s interest in aviation began as a high school student in Centerville, Virginia. A close friend asked them to go to a model rocket club meeting because she didn’t want to go alone. “I ended up going with her and I really liked it, and it ended up being more my style than hers!” – they say with laughter. Building rockets and launching them in rural Virginia gave Dolan hands-on experience in aerospace engineering and convinced them to pursue the field in college.
They attended Purdue University, attracted by its handsome aerospace building and the school’s position as a leading producer of astronauts. While they are grateful for the education they received at Purdue, the dearth of other women on the faculty was glaring.
This gender imbalance motivated Dolan to launch Purdue Women in Aerospace to facilitate connections and work to change the department’s culture. The group has worked to make learning spaces more welcoming to women and planned the inaugural Amelia Earhart Summit to celebrate women’s contributions to the field. Several hundred students, alumni and others gathered for a full day of inspiring speakers, academic and industry panels, and networking opportunities.
During his freshman year of college, Dolan was accepted into the Matthew Isakowitz Scholarship Program, which provides students with jobs at a commercial space company and a career mentor. During the summer, they interned at Nanoracks, developing a miniature cube satellite payload that went to the International Space Station. During their internship, they met MIT AeroAstro alumna Natalia Bailey ’14. As Dolan was leaning toward going to college, Bailey provided valuable advice on where to consider applying and what was included in the application package as well as the MIT plugin.
Even though they applied to other schools, MIT stood out. “At that time I really wasn’t sure whether I wanted to pursue systems engineering more or specialize in guidance, navigation, control and autonomy. I really like that the program at MIT has strengths in both areas,” explains Dolan, adding that not many schools offer both specializations. That way, they would always have the option to switch from one to the other if their interests changed.
Being a good space actor
This option would be useful. To obtain their master’s degree, they conducted two research projects in systems engineering. They joined in their first year Engineering Systems Laboratorycomparing the architecture of Moon and Mars missions to determine which technologies can be successfully implemented on both the Moon and Mars to, as Dolan says, “get bang for the buck.” Then they worked in the Media Lab Ticket a project that aims to create tiles that can self-assemble to create science laboratories, zero-gravity habitats and other applications in space. Dolan worked on controlling the tiles and the possibility of using computer vision in them.
Ultimately, Dolan decided to focus on autonomy for his PhD, with a particular focus on satellite traffic applications. They joined DINaMo Research Groupworking with Hamsa Balakrishnan, associate dean of the Faculty of Engineering, and William Leonhard (1940), professor of aeronautics and astronautics.
Space traffic management is becoming more and more intricate. As the cost of space travel has fallen and fresh launch service providers such as SpaceX have emerged, the number of satellites, as well as the risk of collisions, has increased over the past few decades. Satellites traveling at around 30,000 km per hour can cause catastrophic damage and create debris, which in turn poses an additional threat. The European Space Agency estimated that there are approximately 11,500 satellites in orbit (of which 2,500 are inactive) and over 35,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters. It took place in February last year almost collision — only 33 feet missing — between NASA satellite and an inoperable Russian spy satellite.
Despite these risks, there is no centralized governing body monitoring satellite maneuvers, and many operators are reluctant to provide the exact location of their satellites, although they will provide restricted information, Dolan says. Their PhD thesis aims to address these issues through a model that allows satellites to make autonomous decisions about collision avoidance maneuvers, using information collected from nearby satellites. Dolan’s approach is interdisciplinary and uses reinforcement learning, game theory, and optimal control to extract a graphical representation of the space environment.
Dolan sees this model as a potential tool that could provide decentralized oversight and inform policy: “I am very much an advocate of being a good space actor, thinking of space as a protected resource, much like national parks. Here’s a mathematical tool we can use to really confirm that this kind of information would be helpful.”
Finding your natural fit
Now completing his fifth year on the job, Dolan has been deeply involved in the MIT AeroAstro community since arriving in 2019. He has served as a peer mediator for dREFS program (Friction and Stress Mitigation Department Resources); mentored other students; and served as co-chairman Aeronautical engineering graduates group. As a communications specialist in AeroAstro Communication LaboratoryDolan has created and offers workshops, coaching, and other resources to support students write journal articles, scholarship applications, posters, resumes, and other forms of scholarly communication. “I just believe strongly that all people should have the same resources to be successful in high school,” Dolan says. “MIT does a really great job of providing tons of resources, but sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what they are and who to ask.”
In 2020, they helped found an LGBTQ+ group called QuASAR (Queer Advocacy Space at AeroAstro). Unlike most MIT clubs, QuASAR is open to all faculty members – students and graduates, faculty and staff. Members gather several times a year for social events, and QuASAR has hosted academic and industry panels to better reflect the diversity of identities in the aerospace field.
In his free time, Dolan loves ultrarunning, which is running over distances longer than a marathon. So far, they’ve run 50K and 50-mile races, and recently ran a whopping 200K in a backyard ultramarathon (“basically run until you drop,” Dolan says). It’s a great antidote to stress and, interestingly, they noticed that many PhD students were involved in ultrarunning. “I was talking to my counselor about this once and she said, ‘Sydney, you’re crazy, why the hell would you do something like that?’ She said it with respect! And I said, “Yeah, why would I ever want to do a task that has an ambiguous end date and that requires a lot of work and discipline?” Dolan smiles.
Their hard work and discipline will pay off as they prepare to complete their journey to MIT. After graduation, Dolan hopes to obtain a teaching position at a college or university. They say being a professor is a natural fit, combining a fascination with aerospace engineering with a passion for teaching and mentoring. As for where they will land, Dolan philosophizes, “I’m throwing a lot of darts at the wall and we’ll see… now it’s about the universe.”