While people on Earth are thinking about self-driving cars, Christopher “Chrispy” Petersen is focused on self-driving satellites.

“A satellite that nudges itself in the right direction or performs some aspect of self-repair lets people in the control room focus on other, important mission-oriented tasks,” he says.

Petersen, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, loves pushing the limits of satellite capabilities.

“If we already have all this real-time data from sensors and fine manipulation via actuators, can we use them in a novel way? Can we chain together our algorithms to do the mission in a unique and unconventional way?” he asks.

That pioneering mindset comes naturally to Petersen and other UF space researchers. It’s led them to forge paths in brain research, muscle atrophy, and space manufacturing. Persistence and bootstrapping also help. As a prime example, Petersen used Lego robots early in his career to do crucial satellite simulations on a shoestring budget.

Rachael Seidler has spent years studying spaceflight’s effects on the human brain and body. It started with a random but timely email nearly three decades ago.

Seidler was a graduate student at Arizona State University in the mid-1990s, researching sensory conflict that leads to motion sickness and other problems. One day, she learned that NASA offered graduate student fellowships.

It was 1969, and space was simple. Only a handful of countries had managed to launch satellites into orbit. Just two, the Soviet Union and the United States, were vying for supremacy. And the lunar surface belonged to America alone.

Half a century later, dozens of countries and private companies have since jammed space full of tens of thousands of manmade objects. And humanity’s ambitions for space engineering are only growing: manned missions to Mars, permanent lunar bases, and ever-larger telescopes to peer into the cosmos.

To fulfill those ambitions, the University of Florida has launched the Space Mission Institute, an interdisciplinary hub for space research. The institute helps bring together researchers like Tori Miller, Ph.D., and Christopher Petersen, Ph.D., both in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, who are partnering to imagine the future of space exploration, where self-guided satellites repair and upgrade one another and where we can build structures in space far too big to launch from Earth.