KACST-Stanford Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics
The King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) at Stanford is a collaborative center of excellence for research in aeronautics and astronautics, established in partnership with the Hanson Experimental Physics Laboratory (HEPL) at Stanford.
Our mission is to focus on emerging frontiers in research and innovation in our field, while strengthening KACST's research, development and educational infrastructure in aerospace technologies and space physics.
Our research projects focus on topics of pressing concerns that are furthermore aligned with the Kingdom's global push to raise its technological profile. These include developing new green propellants, performing synergistic experimental and numerical studies of winged flight of birds to enhance the flight characteristics of micro air vehicles and design better flapping robotic wings, and improving the safety of small aircraft by developing automatic stall/spin recovery of fixed-wing and autonomous aircraft.
In the satellite realm, our innovating activities focus on small but efficient orbital sensing systems. We are currently developing the HATTS joint designed to keep a satellite’s solar array pointed toward the sun without twisting and fraying its wires. We are also collaborating with the German Aerospace Center, Bremen University, ZARM, Humboldt University and NASA Ames on the mSTAR project focused on testing Lorentz invariance in low-earth orbit.