Manan Arya (PhD '16), Astronautical Engineer and Builder of Starshades

The future of space exploration depends on origami. While the connection between cutting edge engineering and the ancient art form of paper folding might not be immediately apparent, the discussion below with Manan Arya perfectly encapsulates the near-magical relationship, and the opportunities for discovery that await.

As an engineering science major at the University of Toronto, Arya knew he wanted to pursue something at the interface of aerospace engineering, space exploration, and math. This naturally led him to Caltech for graduate school, where he worked in the research group of Sergio Pellegrino. His focus on the extreme difficulties of folding large and rigid structures proved to the be perfect entree for his work at JPL, where the embrace of origami was already well developed. As Arya explains, the basic challenge is how to get ever larger and more complicated observational structures into space within the confines of a relatively small rocket? And once deployed into space, how can we block the light of stars so that we can focus on their orbiting exoplanets to learn of their composition and suitability to host life? Origami is the answer to both. The next generation of deployable spacecraft will increasingly rely on intricate foldings to fit in their launch capsules and unfurl elegantly in orbit, and starshades, as their name suggests, will provide a crucial capacity to focus clearly and without obstruction on the most promising exoplanets in our nearby universe.

After his appointment at JPL, Arya joined the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Stanford, a program that takes its dividing point as the von Kármán line. Above 100 kilometers in altitude is astronautics, and below is aeronautics. With his Morphing Space Structures Lab, Arya is leading the way to build a new era of astronautical capabilities, set to revolutionize what we can send to space, and what we can learn as a result.

DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Friday, April 19, 2024. It is my great pleasure to be here with Professor Manan Arya. Manan, great to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

MANAN ARYA: Thank you for talking to me, David!

ZIERLER: Would you tell me, please, your title and institutional affiliation?

ARYA: Sure, I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University.

ZIERLER: Tell me about the title of the department, Aeronautics and Astronautics. Where does one begin and the other end?

ARYA: There is actually an exact definition of the difference between aeronautics and astronautics. It's an artificial line between atmospheric flight and space flight. It's called the von Kármán line, named after Theodore von Kármán of course, who was at Caltech. It's 100 kilometers in altitude. It's an arbitrary, nice, round number. In reality, there is no hard and sharp line, but if you have to pick a division, that's a decent one.

ZIERLER: For your own work, the kinds of things that you build and study, are you operating on both sides of the von Kármán line?

ARYA: Most of my work is really focused on things that are above the von Kármán line, so space applications. I'm starting to think about things that may operate within the Earth's atmosphere, but I haven't done much work in that regime yet.

ZIERLER: What's the best way to describe the field that you belong to? Is it astronautical engineering?

ARYA: My degree says "space engineering" which is as good a word as any, though it does bring to mind, I don't know, architecture and interior design, which it is not.

ZIERLER: [laughs] This is a department in EAS at Caltech, space engineering?

ARYA: No, this is a degree offered by GALCIT, by the Graduate Aerospace Labs.

ZIERLER: As a snapshot in time, April 2024, what are you currently working on?

ARYA: A bunch of different things. The overarching theme is structures for spacecraft that need to change their shape by a large degree, typically for folding into tight spaces for launch and unfolding when they get to space. The big projects are things like large radio observatories that could be established on the Moon—think radio telescopes, parabolic radio reflectors—in a crater on the Moon perhaps. Working on robots that can fold flat into tight spaces so you can fit many, many robots into planetary landers, for instance. We're starting to look at how to fold parabolic radio dishes for spacecraft. We're looking at radio lenses for remote sensing spacecraft applications and how to fold these various radio lenses down. Then more fundamental research into the design of origami and kirigami inspired structures for space applications.

Origami Between Math and Art

ZIERLER: Is there an official training or designation by which you could call yourself an origamist?

ARYA: Oh, there is no official training or designation. There is no governing body. We tend to take a big-tent approach. There's ideas that flow between artists and sculptors and mathematicians and physicists, so it's a really vibrant field and a diverse field.

ZIERLER: How do you gain expertise in origami? Is it trial and error? Is it reading books? How does that work?

ARYA: It really depends on what your intention is to do. If you're trying to be an excellent sculptor, somebody who makes beautiful sculpture, then it is essential to practice folding. Modern origami sculpture has attained heights of realism that are extreme. You can find models that people have folded of, for instance, dragons, where each individual scale is individually folded and sculpted out of paper. That's fascinating. That's not the kind of work that I'm doing, of course. If you're interested in thinking about the physics or the mathematics of design of origami, or how to engineer using origami, then the path is to read academic papers, understand the methods being used in these papers, and then try and implement some of these yourselves. There are some textbooks on the design of origami but no very good textbook yet on engineering using origami. That's kind of a hole, and I have friends who are working to fill that hole.

ZIERLER: For space applications, what problems does an origami approach solve?

ARYA: When we say origami approaches, the key thing is that we start off with a flat sheet of material, and then we have to transform it into something packaged without cutting, or without rips or tears. Whenever you want, in space, something that looks like a large sheet of material that needs to be folded up with no damage, let's say, then you start looking at origami for an inspiration. Where would you like large sheets of materials? What applications exist for large sheets of material in space that need to be folded without damage? The applications are many. A common example is photovoltaic arrays, solar arrays for spacecraft. There's also things like radio antennas or radio reflectors for antennas. There are things like sunshields for something like the James Webb Space Telescope. There are light-blocking devices for future space telescopes perhaps. There's solar sails. There's parachutes and drag devices. So, there's a myriad of applications where you just need a large sheet of material in space for some reason or another.

ZIERLER: Where do we see your engineering out in space already, or in development?

ARYA: Most of my work has been at the very early stages of development of technology and research, so not much of my work has actually made it to space. There is one example—my PhD work at Caltech—where I coinvented a packaging method for these large, lightweight but stiff structures that could be folded up. That was flown into space in 2023. Of course that was not entirely my work. I came up with the idea, got my PhD, then left Caltech, and my advisor at Caltech, Sergio Pellegrino, carried on that work and ended up launching something in 2023 and unfolding it in space. But the essential method, the essential design of the structure, was something I had invented back in my PhD days. That's the closest I've come to personally putting something in space.

Most of my work at JPL was trying to advance the technology of these kinds of structures called starshades, which are in the mix, let's say, for consideration for launch into space by NASA for the next big space telescope, which would be likely in the 2040s, so a very long time from now. Starshades are, briefly, mechanisms for blocking starlight so a space telescope may image exoplanets, planets around that star. It's kind of a separate screen that flies in formation with a space telescope, and this giant screen kind of blocks out the starlight so the telescope can peer past the starshade and look at an exoplanet. That was work that we were doing technology advancement, and it has not made it to space yet, but it could, conceivably.

Starshades and the Search for Life

ZIERLER: Of all of the exciting developments in exoplanet research, where is this line of work in enhancing the most interesting questions about biosignatures and technosignatures?

ARYA: I will add the caveat that at some point we're going to get to the edge of my expertise and my knowledge and we're kind of skirting close to that edge now, so—just adding that. When we look for biosignatures or signs of life, potential life around other planets, the thing we have to contend with is starlight. The star is ten billion times brighter than the planet that we're trying to image, and we have to suppress that starlight somehow. Right now, NASA is pursuing two independent technology paths for doing that. One is called coronagraphs, which are internal light-blocking mechanisms that live inside a telescope that do all the work inside the telescope. These mechanisms have attained a high degree of technological maturity because you can build and test them on the ground. In fact, a lot of ground telescopes have coronagraphs now or coronagraph instruments.

The challenge with coronagraphs is you need your primary space mirror to be very, very perfect and very, very stable. You also end up rejecting a lot of the planet light. You end up blocking a lot of the planet light. So, what's called the throughput is not very nice, the amount of photons that you collect from your planet. When you start doing spectral analysis, kind of breaking the light up into a prism, into a rainbow, and looking at signs of chemicals, it's tough to do that or it's challenging to do that with coronagraphs. You end up needing to image—you need to stare at the planet for a very, very long time, in the order of days, to collect enough signal. With starshades, because you do all the starlight blocking outside the telescope, you end up rejecting very little of the planet light, which means you get much better signal from the planet and you are able to collect things like spectra much faster. That's my very, very basic understanding of what the benefits of a starshade approach might be.

ZIERLER: Of course the exoplanet archive is now at something like 5,600. Is this technology something that can make 5,600 seem like a very small number? Does it quickly double or triple? Or is this more incrementally adding to the discovery, adding to the archive?

ARYA: That's a very good question. Starshades are not very good at finding very many planets. They are very good for doing deep investigations, deep stares, deep measurements of a single planet at a time, but they are not survey instruments where you might find hundreds of other exoplanets. That's primarily because the distance between the starshade and the telescope, for the formation flying to work, is something like tens of thousands of kilometers. So, the entire formation needs to kind of move across the sky to point at a different star. The starshade has to trace an arc in the sky that is 50,000 kilometers in radius, and it takes a lot of time for a starshade to move between stars. By a lot of time, we're thinking of something like weeks. If you're going between stars, you can't really cover that many stars within a reasonable lifetime of the starshade. Starshades are very good for doing very, very deep measurements of planets once they've been discovered and once you know they're there, so we're not going to get many, many exoplanet candidates at a potential starshade, but we will get extremely good measurements of the spectral characteristics.

ZIERLER: Beyond exoplanets, what other values for fundamental science do we see with this technology?

ARYA: With starshades?

ZIERLER: Yeah.

ARYA: Starshades are very good for looking at dim objects next to stars. Since I'm not an astronomer, I can only think of a few examples of what these might be. They could be exoplanets, or they could be protoplanetary disks—things that are not yet planets, swirls of material around a star that could turn into planets. Other than that, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe there's some fantastic examples that I'm not aware of. In fact, I'm quite certain there are examples that I'm not aware of.

A New Era of Enormous Space Telescopes

ZIERLER: One of the ongoing arguments for land-based astronomy is that until we figure out a way to launch a 30-meter telescope into space, they are always going to be a wonderful complement to the Hubbles and the James Webbs out there. Is your work—folding technology, origami—at some point in the future does that allow us to think about an era of extremely large telescopes deployed into space?

ARYA: Yes, that is definitely a research direction I am eagerly pursuing. It may not be entirely all folded. Portions of it may be folded. It may in fact be assembled in space by robotic means, where you launch individual parts and it gets put together in space. The fantastic thing about the space environment is that you can imagine supporting not only 30-meter diameter telescopes but you can go much larger, because, well, there's a lot of space in space. You can go 50 meters, you can go 100 meters. The reason you can't do that on the ground is because of gravity. At some point on the ground, the telescope primary gets so big that it becomes very challenging to fight gravity sag, whereas in the microgravity environment of space there is no limitation like that. Ground telescopes are fantastic, but there is a possible future in which their capabilities are exceeded, just in terms of sheer size, by space telescopes. To achieve 50-meter or 100-meter space telescopes, we're going to need not only folding elements but also assembly and servicing potentially, in space. We're starting to think about things along these lines as well.

ZIERLER: Tell me about some of your work supporting Earth science.

ARYA: Most of my work supporting potential Earth science applications has been in developing apertures or reflectors for radio instruments, for radio remote sensing instruments. NASA has a fleet of Earth science satellites that are using techniques like radar and radiometry to look at the Earth. These operate in the radio spectrum. My focus has been on taking reflectors, radio reflectors that are used for these satellites—these are typically a few meters in diameter—and shrinking them such that we can put these radio reflectors, still of reasonable size, on small satellites, which are less expensive to design, launch, and operate. The focus has been on making various different kinds of radio reflectors, things that can focus radio energy, that can present a large area, so your remote sensing instrument gets sufficient gain and resolution, but still be able to somehow stow compactly on board a small satellite.

ZIERLER: I wonder if you can describe the interface with scientists. How are you receiving the objectives that they want to achieve and then translating that into the instruments they need?

ARYA: It really depends on different projects. For starshades, for example, there is a vocal science community doing analyses, writing papers, thinking about—building models of science yields from something like starshades, and telling us what the optical and structural and mechanical performance requirements are. For things like radio instruments for Earth science—there, because the scale of the projects I've been working on has been smaller, we tend to find requirements for these kinds of instruments that have been written down by scientists in driving documents for NASA, something like the Earth Science Decadal Survey, which lays out priorities for Earth science for NASA for ten years at a time. In these documents there are descriptions of what instruments are needed and what capabilities are needed. So, it really depends on the scale of the project. If it's a big enough project then there's enough scientists on board to provide information real time. If it's a small project, we look at what people have written in the past.

ZIERLER: An overall question for how you develop these morphing structures—are you creating the algorithms yourself, or are the algorithms out there and you're using them to then generate the geometry necessary for the structure?

ARYA: This is actually a primary area of research and research development. Yes, there are many algorithms out there, but we focus on advancing these algorithms and creating new ones. That's really an area where I'm tremendously interested. The focus has been on really developing new methods. I can give examples if you like of how we generate the fold patterns.

ZIERLER: Please. I'd love it.

ARYA: One kind of origami pattern that ends up being used a lot is something that—I'm going to show it you, but I don't know if it's going to come through on [laughs] audio. It's a pattern that takes a sheet of paper or a sheet of material and wraps it around a central kind of polygonal prismatic hub.

ZIERLER: Let the record show that Manan just showed me—it looked like a beautiful flower that was coming open.

ARYA: This is one of the challenges with podcasts [laughs]; a lot of what I do is visual. Algorithms exist for generating the forms of these fold patterns, where I place the fold lines such that I get certain properties. What we're doing right now is advancing these algorithms to work for novel classes of structures where the unfolded structure may not be flat. A lot of people have spent a lot of time thinking about what you can fold with a single flat sheet of paper, but as engineers we are interested frequently in folding things that may not be flat. There's a lot of fun mathematics that needs to come in when you think about folding things like parabolic dishes, using similar methods but now we no longer have the requirement of flatness. The other avenue we're pushing down is what happens if the crease lines are not straight. What if they are curves? Then you require correspondingly more complicated math to describe it. We're also thinking of folding ruffled surfaces, so corrugated surfaces. You mentioned flowers. There's many flowers that are kind of ruffled at the edges, and we're thinking about how do we take these fold patterns that have been developed for flat sheets and adapt them to fold ruffled surfaces or corrugated surfaces. That's a fun and intense area of activity.

Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence

ZIERLER: When we think about algorithms, nowadays we immediately go to artificial intelligence. You're at ground zero for some of the most exciting things happening in AI. Being at Stanford, having those AI capabilities, is that really an asset for what you are doing?

ARYA: Definitely. I think because it is in the air over here and in the water, it's very easy to learn about new capabilities and it's very easy to be exposed to new capabilities. That puts me in a good position to think about how to exploit these new capabilities for doing the sort of work that we're doing. There are a lot of people interested in how to use machine learning methods and data-driven methods for designing origami and kirigami patterns. It's early to say whether they're going to have these designs.

ZIERLER: Are algorithms out there in the ether waiting to be discovered, or are they more built or constructed? In either case, as a research tool, how does AI either help you find those that are preexisting or create them out of nothing?

ARYA: That's really two questions, and the first question is very philosophical. People have been thinking about whether we invent math or discover math for a long time. I don't have a ready answer for you. I adopt the frame of mind that's most useful at the point. Frequently it doesn't matter whether they are invented or discovered.

ZIERLER: As a research tool, if you're using AI, are you using AI to go out and find the algorithms that are important for the morphing, or are you building them out of scratch using AI?

ARYA: To be perfectly clear, we're not right now using AI or machine learning tools to do anything. We're still in the process of thinking about how we might use them. There are some researchers who started early to do some initial things with AI and origami pattern design and kirigami pattern design. Kirigami is origami's cousin where cuts are allowed. Right now we're not using AI or machine learning algorithms in our work.

ZIERLER: That's useful to know. Because there's so much hype around AI—it's everything—it's useful to know that you can do cutting-edge engineering at Stanford and AI is not there yet. That's a good historical marker. Manan, what about just being in the Bay Area, startup central; are you involved at all in industry, in entrepreneurial pursuits to some degree?

ARYA: Nope! [laughs] The focus is 100 percent on my job as a professor, which has many components. I am kept sufficiently busy and sufficiently interested in just my job as a professor.

ZIERLER: Does the Morphing Space Structures Laboratory precede you, or you came to Stanford to found it?

ARYA: I came to Stanford to found it.

ZIERLER: Was there anything at Stanford already similar in that field?

ARYA: There was a lot of work in our department before I joined on lightweight composite materials, carbon fiber type materials, that had some commonality. There were researchers in the Mechanical Engineering Department who were studying morphing structures for various applications. But the particular intersection of spacecraft and morphing structures was novel.

ZIERLER: A current events question—some difficulties at JPL, a lot of turnover right now—are you in touch with your old colleagues? Do you have a sense of what they're feeling, what they're going through right now?

ARYA: Yes, I am very much in touch with my old colleagues and current friends who have been through that, who have lost their jobs. The people who have lost their jobs, some are scrambling, some have already found positions at alternative places. I think everybody is a bit shocked, in some sense, because of course one takes a job at JPL not only because of the obvious prestige that comes with it, but there's also a sense of stability that comes with being at a government contractor. So, I think a lot of people just were not expecting that to happen. The folks who are left still at JPL, I think there's a sense—how shall I put it?—everybody is worried if it stops at eight percent cuts.

ZIERLER: Because Mars sample return is very up in the air and it might even be back to the drawing board for what it could look like to get a Mars sample return back, is there a morphing structure opportunity for cost saving, for efficiency, for however that might look?

ARYA: I haven't spent too much time thinking about it. There are some opportunities, especially in the lander design potentially. I've talked to folks about landing pads that could expand out their area for the lander to land on Mars, maybe. There's definitely solar panels on these landers that have to be unfolded. There's definitely opportunities, but I think right now the one thing that is clear is that NASA would like it very much if the work was done with minimal development of new technology. Even if there were opportunities, I don't know how receptive NASA would be to, "We're going to spend a couple of years developing and maturing this technology." I think they'd rather just use existing technologies and get it done.

Aerospace at the University of Toronto

ZIERLER: Let's go back now and establish some personal history. Growing up, were you always interested at the interface of space and engineering?

ARYA: I was always interested in space, and I think I've always liked, yeah, what I came to recognize as engineering. So, yeah. I wanted to be an astronaut.

ZIERLER: Tell me about your education at University of Toronto.

ARYA: I joined the University of Toronto in 2007. The program that I joined is commonly seen as one of the best engineering undergraduate programs in Canada, called Engineering Science. It's a highly intensive program of study. As the name suggests, it focuses on building of foundational science knowledge in addition to engineering knowledge so that the engineers can go out and do cutting-edge work. I was at the University of Toronto from 2007 to 2011. I graduated with a degree in Engineering Science with a specialization in Aerospace Engineering.

ZIERLER: What kind of lab work or research opportunities did you have as an undergrad?

ARYA: In my third year of undergraduate, I did a summer of research with a professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, or UTIAS as it's called. Professor Craig Steeves was my advisor at that time. He had just joined the University, and he was working on various solid and structural mechanics applications. The particular research that I did with him was thinking about these kind of lattice structures, these periodic structures, and designing these lattice structures to have specific acoustic properties. We could design these structures to have properties such that they would prevent the passage of acoustic waves at particular frequencies. This was a summer of just pure coding—it was a lot of coding work—but it was really fun for me, taking ideas from fundamental science—wave propagation, acoustic wave propagation—coding that up, writing that in a conference paper. I really enjoyed it. Then of course our degree had an undergraduate thesis component. I don't know how common that is, but it was a full year of research that I did with Professor Chris Damaren at the University and wrote an undergrad thesis on designing controllers for very flexible spacecraft, feedback control devices for very large, very slender spacecraft structures that would whip around quite a bit. So, how do you control a large structure in space?

ZIERLER: The title of the degree, Engineering Science, was it really a good balance between basic science and engineering?

ARYA: A hundred percent, yeah. The way the program is structured is the first two years are common across all Engineering Science students. There, you learn about basic science from anything that engineering could touch—physics and chemistry of course, and basic dynamics and applied mathematics and calculus of course, but also electromagnetics, special relativity, bioengineering, biomedical science, civil engineering, civil science. The next two years, the focus years are where you really go in depth into your particular focus area. I've been at Caltech and I've been at Stanford, and I haven't really found an undergraduate program that matches the level of scientific depth and rigor that Engineering Science at U of T took us to.

ZIERLER: Did you always see yourself on an academic track? Did you ever think about going into industry?

ARYA: Oh gosh, no, I did not envision myself as an academic at all. Honestly I had no plan. [laughs] I had no idea of whether I wanted to go into industry or academia. I was kind of just following my nose [laughs] at every point I had to make a decision.

ZIERLER: Was there a professor who turned you onto Caltech? Did you associate Caltech with JPL?

ARYA: The reason the Caltech connection came about was my undergraduate advisor, the one who I did the summer with, Craig Steeves, he had been a postdoc at UCSB. While he was at UCSB he was collaborating with Chiara Daraio, who was at that time a member of GALCIT. This is the 2011 timeframe. I think Professor Steeves must have written me a very good reference letter because I got admitted to Caltech when I applied. I really wanted to work with Chiara because Chiara was also working on these kinds of periodic arrangements of materials and structures that had interesting acoustic properties. I saw myself doing that because it was interesting to me, and I had fun doing that. Then I think the other person whose attention I must have caught, probably because of Professor Steeves' recommendation, is Sergio Pellegrino, who had just joined Caltech at that time. Sergio was at Cambridge before, and Professor Steeves had done his PhD at Cambridge, so I think they must have met each other at least at Cambridge.

ZIERLER: Even when you got to Caltech, as a first-year graduate student, you still didn't see yourself on an academic track necessarily, becoming a professor?

ARYA: Gosh, no. At the beginning, I was really interested in Professor Daraio's work, and at some point I started thinking about small satellites and the kinds of big structures that could be stored on board small satellites. I quickly switched my interests. Well, not quickly, but I slowly switched my interests to what Sergio was doing at Caltech.

ZIERLER: Coming from such an enormous school, University of Toronto, were you prepared for how small Caltech was?

ARYA: Thinking about it now, it was unusual, but it wasn't startling. I think that's because of two reasons. One, the Engineering Science community at Toronto was very small, of the order of 300 students or so. It was a very insular and siloed community of students, so I always felt like I was in a small program at University of Toronto. When I went from a class of 300 or so to a class of a thousand graduate students, it wasn't that startling. The second thing is many Engineering Science friends also came to Caltech, or to UCLA, so I had a bunch of Engineering Science friends in the area. So, there was kind of an easy transition there.

Getting to GALCIT

ZIERLER: From your undergraduate degree, which you said was so valuable in its balance, did you feel well prepared when you got to Caltech?

ARYA: Yes. The graduate program in aerospace engineering at Caltech, at GALCIT, is famous for being very intense. I enjoyed every second of it, and I think I did that because even though it was a lot of new material and a lot of deep study, I had been put in a position because of EngSci, because of Engineering Science, to absorb that.

ZIERLER: When you got comfortable around campus, tell me some of the big, exciting things that were happening at GALCIT.

ARYA: At. GALCIT, Chiara's research was of course really, really fantastic and alluring. Sergio had just joined a few years previous to me coming to Caltech. That was really fabulous because he had this fantastic big lab in the Guggenheim building that had been recently renovated. It was gigantic and very pleasing to look at. Some of the other things that were happening—of course I was aware of the Keck Institute for Space Studies that was starting up, and there were lectures and courses et cetera that Keck—that KISS was putting on. Those were the things I was aware of. Then of course Professor Dennis Kochmann, who has since moved to ETH Zurich, was also there. He was also relatively young and doing some interesting work in the mechanics of solids and structures. I was intrigued by his work as well.

ZIERLER: How soon or long did it take for you to become Sergio's student?

ARYA: I think I officially joined his lab at the end of my first year at Caltech. Maybe it was a few weeks into the summer, maybe a few weeks before the summer, but around that time.

ZIERLER: What were some of the big projects that Sergio was pursuing at that point?

ARYA: There was a big project on high-altitude balloons, these very, very slender, very lightweight structures that are called superpressure balloons. They look kind of like pumpkins, and there's a very fun interaction that happens between the plastic film and these tendons that hold in all the pressure. There was work going on there. There was work going on in making flexible carbon fiber composites for folding up, folding things. Then he had this project—which has a terrible acronym, it's called AAReST—it's the Autonomous Assembly of a Reconfigurable Space Telescope project. The idea was to have a bunch of CubeSats, a bunch of small satellites, each with their own little mirror segment. These CubeSats would assemble to make a big mirror, and then there would be an instrument at one end that would use this synthesized telescope to take images. This was really exciting because as part of my first year of graduate studies, I was enrolled in the course Ae105abc that was a project-based course in space engineering, and the project was to develop this spacecraft concept. We were literally using techniques and methods that folks at JPL were teaching us—we had instructors from JPL in that course—and going into the lab and building real hardware and testing it. That was really exciting.

ZIERLER: Was JPL immediately an asset for you as a graduate student? Would you spend time there?

ARYA: No, I would not. Because I was a Canadian citizen at the time—I still am a Canadian citizen—and I did not have a U.S. citizenship or a U.S. green card, it was difficult for me to get onto campus. The primary way that I interacted with JPLers was through this AAReST project which I really got involved in, even during my graduate studies, which had nothing to do with space telescopes by the way. And instructors for Ae105, I TA'd, so I got to know some JPLers through that. Then there would be visitors or guests from JPL who would occasionally visit and give courses sometimes. One course I remember is Jim Breckinridge, who has since passed away, he would teach a course on optical instrument design. He was previously at JPL. He was instrumental in the corrective lenses for Hubble, that episode.

The Challenge of Biaxial Folding

ZIERLER: Manan, tell me about developing your thesis topic. What was available and exciting to you?

ARYA: When we first started, the thinking was we would study in detail the unfolding mechanics of these very thin sheets that had been folded together, and we would study, by unfolding these sheets very carefully, how much force it takes to unfold them as a function of how much you've unfolded them, look at things like electrostatic attraction between these sheets as they are stuck together. That was kind of the first topic I dived into, and it was not tremendously interesting to me, so in my first or second year or graduate study, I decided to switch topics. The new topic was trying to address a set of challenges in the field that, to my knowledge, were unaddressed. This had to do with trying to fold large sheets of material that were stiff, so not thin films but something that has platelike stiffness, trying to fold these biaxially, so reducing both dimensions of the sheet and folding it efficiently—volume efficiently with very little volume wasted, and elastically so that you could recover the initial unfolded shape very nicely. This was a technique that I coinvented, let's say, with Nicolas Lee, who was a postdoc in Sergio's lab at that time and is now a staff member at the Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, and of course Sergio. This new technique that we coinvented, I felt a great deal or sense of ownership for that, and a lot more passion for that, so that quickly ended up being the thesis topic.

ZIERLER: Tell me about the nature of the collaboration with Nicolas. What did you each bring to the table?

ARYA: Nicolas had done his PhD at the Stanford Aero/Astro Department, working on designing folding patterns for coiling up sheets of material. He had also done a lot of work in designing experiments for various plasma measurements. So, he had a deep knowledge of prototyping electronics, hardware, how to set up experiments, and a very intuitive grasp of how sheetlike materials want to fold up. It was fantastic to be able to bounce ideas off of him when we were developing this method. Of course when it came time to test these structures, it was fantastic to work with him to prototype mechanisms and experiments. Of course the most key, instrumental thing was that the idea, the central idea, came as a result of a conversation between me and Nicolas in a hotel room after a long day at a conference. We were sharing a hotel room. I have somewhere in my notebooks the first sketches we drew. That was the seed of the idea. That was really valuable. Without that, nothing happens.

ZIERLER: The materials themselves, are you buying these off the shelf? Are you engaged in materials science developing them? How does that work?

ARYA: Most of the materials I use and have used have been off the shelf. There are some novel materials that we end up not developing but being sort of the first users of. These end up being very, very thin, fiber-reinforced composite materials, so very thin carbon fiber materials or generally speaking very thin fiber materials. We switch between carbon and glass fibers. We're not developing these materials but we are involved in being the first adopters of them.

ZIERLER: From the initial sketches to having a prototype in the lab, what did that process look like?

ARYA: It was fairly quick because the first prototypes were not made out of these thick, platelike materials; they were made out of very thin membranes as well, thin film-like materials. Those, I remember using a laser cutter in a machine shop at Caltech to really quickly make the fold pattern and do some testing. Of course this was happening, quote unquote, "on my own time," because the primary research project was still this study of unfolding mechanics. That was actually the topic of my candidacy exam, which is an exam that graduate students give in their second year at Caltech to prove that they can do research, that they're capable of doing research. I think there was a process of about four or six months where I was trying to juggle both these projects. At some point I think we managed to convince Sergio that this new idea was worth pursuing. Sergio may have a different recollection of this.

The Origins of the Space Solar Project

ZIERLER: In testing the prototypes, what exactly are you testing, and are there theories—in fluid dynamics, in mechanics—that put intellectual boundaries on what a successful experiment looks like?

ARYA: In the initial experiments at Caltech we were looking at how tightly we can coil up these structures. The theoretical backing or the model backing for these experiments was fairly simple. We made predictions about how tightly we could pack them based on very, very simple mechanical models, almost graphical methods. The experiments, when we starting moving to platelike structures, ended up being a bit more complicated. There was a lot of work done in trying to fabricate these platelike structures that could be folded. Then there were a set of experiments on, can we controllably unfold these structures? At some point between us bringing this idea to Sergio, this work, which was previously kind of some pure-form invention type work, ended up being rolled into a project that Sergio and Harry Atwater and Ali Hajimiri were kicking off at Caltech at the time, which was the Space Solar Power Project.

ZIERLER: Oh, wow.

ARYA: The team for the entire project needed a way to fold up their very large structures that would collect solar power in space and beam it down to the Earth, and it became very clear very quickly that the methods we were inventing were really well suited to answering the needs of this project.

ZIERLER: Who figured that out? Did the team figure that out, or you figured that out?

ARYA: I don't know. I don't remember. I think the most likely scenario is that it was Sergio. Because he put me on that project, and—see, at the beginning, the entire project had very little idea of what the eventual concept would look like.

ZIERLER: Is that to say, Manan, that you were primarily thinking about, "This is a technology demonstration"?

ARYA: Yeah, yeah. We were thinking about it as a generic method for folding up large sheets or large structures. We were not thinking in particular about the Space Solar Power needs until we were on the project and then consistently meeting with Harry and Ali's teams.

ZIERLER: How far along in the development of the Space Solar Project was it before presumably it was Sergio who had this idea?

ARYA: I don't know. I don't know how far before us joining the team the Space Solar Power Project was developing technically. I don't have the timeline straight in my head. I know this was around 2013 or 2014 that we started infusing this idea into that project.

ZIERLER: What was your reaction, not thinking about applications and then all of a sudden being potentially an integral part of this extraordinarily exciting project?

ARYA: I always thought of my work—or our work, Nicolas's and my work—as being independent of that project but contributing to that project. We were still developing general methods and general theories and general ways of folding these structures that could be applicable generically, and then we were doing some work on the side that would apply these methods to the Space Solar Power Project. That was the thinking at the time. That was exciting, because hey, we had a use case, right? Something that could ground our work and show applicability. That was tremendously exciting. The Space Solar Power Project, that was a—even at that time, more so—kind of a brilliant but crazy idea. It was fantastic to be part of it.

ZIERLER: Did you stay close to the project? Are you still on the periphery of what they're doing?

ARYA: I stopped being directly involved in that project when I graduated from Caltech. Even when I was at JPL, I was hearing about it. I'd occasionally go back to Sergio's lab at Caltech for various other collaborations that we had going on and I'd check in on them and see what they were doing, but I stopped being technically involved in that project in 2016. All the work that has happened since has been without my direct input. In fact, a lot of the mechanism design, spacecraft demonstrator that Sergio built, most of that was done—well, all of that was done without me. They had to redesign some of the—they had to come up with new ways of doing some things which I had originally proposed. So, there has been a lot of going back to the whiteboard, so to speak, on that folding method since I left.

ZIERLER: The contributions and conclusions in your thesis, where did that place you more broadly in the research community? What would be the conferences to present at, the journals to write in? Who would be your closest engineering and scientific peers?

ARYA: It's a small field of people who are interested in these kinds of shape-changing spacecraft structures. To a large degree Sergio was a pioneer in that field and remains a pioneer in that field. Our conferences that we would go to were organized by the AIAA, the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. We would go to their yearly big conference. The journals are of course then AIAA journals. They have a series of journals that we publish in. There are some other journals that relate to solids and structural mechanics that we sometimes end up publishing in. There are general science and engineering journals that sometimes we reach out to, but it's on occasion.

ZIERLER: Were there other research groups besides Sergio that were really important for you as a graduate student?

ARYA: Within Caltech or without Caltech?

ZIERLER: Within Caltech.

ARYA: Not really, I would say. Of course Harry Atwater and Ali Hajimiri, just because of the close interaction we had with them. But within Caltech, from a research standpoint, it was really Sergio's group.

ZIERLER: I'll return to the question, and let's see if the answer is yes now—thinking about being on an academic track, by the time that you had defended your dissertation, were you thinking about postdocs leading to faculty positions, or still no?

ARYA: Still no. Gosh, no. Around about year three or four of my PhD, my dream was to go work at JPL. I was not thinking about an academic position at all.

ZIERLER: Being a Canadian citizen, how did you prepare for that hope, to work for JPL?

ARYA: There were prior examples. One member of our group, John Steeves, who is a Canadian, had joined JPL. There was another member of Guillaume Blanquart's group, Jason Rabinovitch, who had joined JPL, also a Canadian. So, there were existing proofs that that could be done. Both John and Jason were very clear in that it is possible; it's just that the extra bureaucracy of bringing on a foreign national to JPL has to be justified for JPL.

ZIERLER: Did you ever think about trying to become a citizen? Was that feasible?

ARYA: I did think about it, and we did end up applying for a green card while I was at JPL, but the funny thing is that even though I'm a Canadian citizen I was born in India, and green card applications are considered on the basis of where you were born, not where you are a citizen of. There are so many applications for green cards from India that it takes an enormously long time to get a green card, in the order of kind of a hundred years for the lane that I was in. So, that did not end up happening. Of course that's the first step to citizenship.

ZIERLER: JPL of course is a big place. Given the smallness of your field, was it easy to figure out where to situate yourself?

ARYA: Yes. I had interacted with who would end up being my group supervisor at conferences, so my group supervisor at JPL, Case Bradford, knew me, knew me from conferences, knew me from work. He was in fact the person who had to bear the brunt of the paperwork and the bureaucracy to onboard me. So, the choice was clear.

ZIERLER: Did you ever interact with Robert Lang? Did you get a sense of his legacy at JPL?

ARYA: Yes. I met Robert—I'm going to say in 2016, he was visiting Sergio's group just for something, and I remember just absolutely being enthralled to meet with him and talk to him. I think we were talking about various origami methods. I think he at some point—he didn't like the fact that I was pursuing non-origami methods for—the folding method we invented involved cutting material, which is of course anathema to origami purists. So, yeah, I met Robert in 2016. I was of course aware of his legacy both at Caltech and at JPL. My roommate at the time was a laser physicist, or a laser engineer, and of course Robert Lang got his start getting a physics PhD from Caltech in laser physics, and working in that field before he became a full-time origami person.

Starshades at JPL

ZIERLER: Tell me about your initial work at JPL. What did you get involved in?

ARYA: Starshade. That was really my biggest—70 percent of my time at JPL overall was spent doing starshade technology development. JPL had this project to mature starshade technology by full-scale experiments on starshades. Starshades, the particular example we were considering at that time was, when fully unfolded, 30 meters in diameter, so the size of a baseball diamond, if you want to think of it that way. We were doing experiments in building, realizing full-scale starshade structures, folding them, parts of which had to be folded using origami-inspired methods, and unfolding them many times to show that the unfolded shape could meet required tolerances. That was really the tentpole project for me at JPL.

ZIERLER: Was this generally application driven or specifically mission driven, or was there a basic science feel to this work?

ARYA: This was a technology advancement project, so there were several potential science mission concepts that the technology advancement could be applicable to. At some point there was a concept to launch a starshade to go rendezvous with what was then known as WFIRST, now known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is launching in a few years, knock on wood. So, we were aiming towards that. Then NASA decided not to put a starshade along with WFIRST. Then there was a concept called HabEx, the Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, which was being considered by the Astrophysics2020 decadal survey. There was that concept. So, there were a number of scientific proposals that were being developed, and we were kind of working in parallel, trying to make sure that we were applicable to all of these different scientific mission concepts.

ZIERLER: What was most exciting to you, beyond your particular work, having interface, connections with all the other things that were going on at JPL?

ARYA: For me, JPL was—is—just a mythical place. I'm still a space nerd; I was a space geek back then too, and I remember being, in my first year of graduate studies, at a party that the Planetary Society threw for the landing of Curiosity in 2011 or 2012. I just remember seeing all these people on the stage—Rob Manning, et cetera—from JPL, and I was—just kind of the mythical status of things like the Voyager spacecraft, et cetera. Being at JPL, every day I was there and I would walk past the big thermal vacuum chambers, the space simulators, I would just—be in awe of that place. I'm still in awe of that place. It was just—mind-blowing.

ZIERLER: I'm sure you've heard—at Caltech we really evangelize and push the idea that JPL is a part of Caltech, that Caltech manages JPL, which is not necessarily well appreciated and understood by the public or even many JPLers themselves. Coming from Caltech yourself, what was your sense of that relationship?

ARYA: I heard this, too; I did not sense that, mainly because my immediate group at JPL included Caltech PhDs like John Steeves, who was previously a member of Sergio's group. My boss, Case Bradford, got his PhD at Caltech as well. So, I was surrounded by Caltech PhDs. Then of course I had been part of several KISS workshops. So, I always saw Caltech and JPL as kind of connected, bridged in some way. While at Caltech I took advantage of various funding opportunities that exist to encourage collaborations between JPL and Caltech. There was a specific fund called PDRDF, for the President's and Director's Research Fund or something like that, and I was part of several of those projects or proposed some of those. I've heard people describe that JPLers have this identity separate from Caltech, and to some extent maybe that's true, but from my perspective it was always part and parcel of the same thing.

ZIERLER: How far along was the Starshade project by the time you joined?

ARYA: The starshade work at JPL had started in the early 2010s—2010, 2011, 2012, roundabout there. The basic concept had been developed for how to fold up this very large structure. People had made component level pieces of them, of starshades, at full scale, and measured them. There were many, many holes; many, many parts that were unknown how to engineer; many parts that were untested. That's where I found myself. Going more technically into detail, the project that I joined was called S5, or Starshade to TRL 5. TRL is NASA-speak for Technology Readiness Level. It's a measure of how technically mature a technology is. Zero is napkin sketch; nine is spaceflight. We were somewhere in the middle. The objective was to get everything on Starshade to TRL 5.

ZIERLER: Administratively, where did you sit? What directive or what building?

ARYA: I was in Group 355L. I think that was the Large Spacecraft Structures group? I forget exactly what the name of the group was. But 355 was hilariously the small spacecraft engineering and payloads section. I don't know why 355L was situated there, but I think it's because 355, the section, for about 300 engineers or so, was intended to be more of a research and technology development section within Division 35, the Mechanical Engineering Division. Because Division 35 I think had not had a focus on research and technology development, or if there was a focus, it was very dispersed across the entire division until 355 Section was formed. That section was supposed to be the R&D-type section. Small spacecraft, which was at that point kind of an R&D-type topic, was assigned that.

ZIERLER: Given the central utility of Starshade for exoplanets, did that put you adjacent to the Exoplanet Discovery Group?

ARYA: Yeah, the Exoplanet Exploration Program, or ExEP, which is the NASA program that JPL runs, was closely monitoring and funding this work.

ZIERLER: To go back to the potential connections—with PMA at Caltech, IPAC, all of the work on campus with exoplanets, how much interface was there?

ARYA: Not much, because the techniques that, to my knowledge, folks at PMA were pursuing all had to do with coronagraphy. Sometimes I'd attend like SPIE conferences and find those folks there, but on a day-to-day basis or even a month-to-month basis, there was very little interaction with PMA folks.

ZIERLER: Was there a general interest or would you be interested yourself in touting the capacities of a morphing or a folding or an origami approach, around Lab? Would you talk to people generally about these things?

ARYA: Yes. That's what I tried to position myself as, is kind of expert in origami-inspired design at JPL. That was to a large degree true. There were other people working on deployable structures and foldable structures, but they were not origami inspired.

ZIERLER: Did you get yourself involved in new projects just as a result of happenstance conversations?

ARYA: Not only happenstance conversations, but I purposefully wrote proposals to launch ideas and launch projects that I was kind of leading. That occupied the remainder of the 30 percent of my time at JPL, was projects to do with un-foldable radio reflectors for communications or remote sensing, projects to do with various other types of unfolding structures.

ZIERLER: Did the remote sensing work get you more closely involved in Earth science?

ARYA: It got me adjacent to Earth science but not directly involved. I was mainly working with the engineering folks on these projects.

ZIERLER: How long ultimately did you stay at JPL?

ARYA: I was at JPL from 2016 to 2022, about five and a half years.

The Move to Stanford

ZIERLER: What were the considerations for the move to Stanford?

ARYA: Oh, gosh. The one thing that happened was I could not get a green card, so I was still a foreign national, which means that I was working only on R&D topics. It is very difficult for somebody who is a foreign national to be on a flight project at JPL. The big challenge was there was a view at JPL—and maybe this is still true, maybe this is not true, I don't know—but at the time there was a view that to advance, to get promotions, you have to work on flight projects. If you only do research and development, for engineers that was not seen as a path to advancement. That was mainly because the promotions were tied to how many people you were supervising, and R&D projects invariably end up being smaller teams than big flight projects. All of my cohort, let's say, all of the advancements that I saw were people who had made this advancement by switching from R&D projects to flight projects. I did not want to stay for another five years, let's say, at JPL without making significant advances in my status. Compared to other private space companies, JPL does not pay at a comparable level. The reason for that is there's more stability at JPL, which is fantastic.

ZIERLER: Or at least there used to be, unfortunately.

ARYA: Or there used to be, yeah. But it was becoming very difficult to live in Los Angeles at the time, to be able to afford a house, without getting some sort of promotion, and I did not see that on the horizon for me.

ZIERLER: Did you think about adjacent work in industry? Is SpaceX, for example, thinking about origami?

ARYA: They most definitely are. Or they were at some point; I'm not sure about right now. They do have unfolding structures on Starlink satellites. But again, it's very difficult for foreign nationals to find employment at space companies, primarily because of restrictions that the federal government puts on these companies, the ITAR and EAR restrictions.

ZIERLER: The takeaway here is that a security clearance, whether you're working at a place like JPL or SpaceX, ultimately it's still run by the government.

ARYA: Yes. It's not quite a security clearance. There has to be kind of an export license that has to be set up. Because any transfer of knowledge from a U.S. person to a foreign national that involves space stuff is counted as an export, so you have to get an export license to do that, and that's just tremendously burdensome. At a place like SpaceX, where it tries to minimize red tape, this will not work. It's the same at every other company.

ZIERLER: COVID in 2020, 2021, how much were you able to get done remotely, not being onsite?

ARYA: There was a lot that got done remotely. For Starshade, I was flying almost every other week to Colorado, where a bunch of our contractors are. That ended up stopping entirely. Most of the experimental work was done actually in Colorado for Starshade. That ended up stopping, so that could not continue. A lot of the work moved from being experimental in nature to computational in nature. That was a step that we took. A lot of the work that could not be made computational, that had to be experimental, ended up happening on apartment floors, and coordinating with interns and other workers trying to put things together. JPL actually instituted some very nice policies where they would allow for shipments of—if you wanted something like aluminum bars and brackets and stuff from a commercial supplier, they would allow the shipments to come directly to your house, so we could assemble experiments in our homes. I know a lot of people did that. A lot of people had even more extensive prototyping and engineering stations set up in their homes. That definitely happened. At some point it was feasible to come back to the Lab for doing experiments that could not be done [laughs] in apartments.

ZIERLER: Once again, the question of academic track and thinking about yourself as a professor, did you go on the market? Did somebody at Stanford approach you?

ARYA: I first went on the market in 2019 and did not get any offers. Then I went on the market again in 2020 and ended up getting a few offers. There was kind of the motivation to leave JPL because of the reasons I mentioned. There was also—I was realizing that I enjoyed research and technology development, and there was some room for that at JPL, but not something that would be lauded and rewarded. I enjoyed supervising students at JPL. There would be graduate students that would come join the group occasionally, and that was tremendously fun and interesting. So, there was kind of a thought that maybe I could do that. I was also beginning to realize that a lot of the work I was doing was still very much at the frontier of engineering research. I would go to conferences and I would present, and it would be interesting and new things. All of these kind of pushed me towards pursuing an academic path. I did not anticipate getting an offer from a place like Stanford. I was happy to accept [laughs] offers from other places.

ZIERLER: This was a happy surprise, what a great place you could land at?

ARYA: Yes, definitely.

ZIERLER: How much intellectually did you feel like you were pivoting, from being a technologist at JPL to being a professor and all that that means? Teaching, running a group, funding, putting a lab together. Was that really a big learning curve or could you draw on your Caltech experience just to see how it looked, at least from a graduate student perspective?

ARYA: At Caltech I was very little involved in funding and proposal writing, I think by design. I learned everything I know about proposal writing at JPL. JPL has a number of programs for internal proposals, and of course writing proposals to NASA. I learned all of that at JPL. I ended up having several successful proposals written at JPL. That was tremendously formative. In terms of doing research, a tremendous amount learned at Caltech, a tremendous amount learned at JPL. Teaching—I TA'd some courses at Caltech, but then there were other opportunities for me to do teaching outside. For instance, there was a program that the Huntington Library had, and they hired me to teach a class at the Esteban E. Torres High School, which is in—gosh, I forget the name of the neighborhood now; it's like Lincoln Park or something. I taught a course on origami engineering to a bunch of high school seniors. That was fun to develop that course. It's very different from teaching undergraduates—okay, maybe not so different from [laughs] teaching undergraduates. That was formative and that was fun. But I'm still learning how to teach. I've only been here two years, and I see several areas for improvement. In terms of running a group, establishing a lab, mentorship, yeah, these are things that I'm learning, still. I think some of the mentorship was learned at JPL. There were graduate students that would occasionally spend summers at JPL for research, in fact some from Chiara Daraio's group, so that was a fun reconvergence. But still I'm learning how to do those.

ZIERLER: Were you aware of the Aeronautics and Astronautics reputation at Stanford? Did you know some of your colleagues now?

ARYA: A hundred percent, yeah. My college roommate from EngSci actually got his PhD in this department.

ZIERLER: Oh, wow.

ARYA: I am now colleagues with his PhD advisor, so that's fun. Our group at JPL had hired a graduate of this department, so I knew that. Then of course I knew through Nicolas Lee, who was a graduate of this department, the reputation. So, yes, I was aware of the reputation. Then of course with Starshade, I had known Simone D'Amico at Stanford who is an expert on formation flight of spacecraft. I knew Professor D'Amico through Starshade. So, I was broadly aware of the standing of the department.

Naming a New Lab

ZIERLER: How did you come up with the name "Morphing Space Structures Laboratory"? What does that encapsulate? What is it meant to convey?

ARYA: Structures is important because I'm a structural engineer. That's the basic category I'd lump myself in. I could have gone with "origami" or "shape-changing" or "folding," but "morphing" is more encompassing and broader. That's because even though I do a lot of origami-inspired design, the basic idea is still shape change. That can be accomplished many different ways, not just origami. "Morphing" seemed like a good way to encompass that. "Morphing Structures Laboratory" had already been taken, so I had to add "Space" in there to make it unique.

ZIERLER: What was some of the most important funding to get the Lab up and running?

ARYA: Most of the important funding came actually from NASA and from JPL. The work we're doing right now to some degree is funding or projects that were launched while I was at JPL. Starshade remains a focus, but now we're looking at other sources of funding, of course. This Lunar Crater Radio Telescope project, where we're trying to build a radio telescope on the Moon, that was kicked off when I was at JPL. There's a project on radio lenses that came from NASA while I was at JPL. So, a lot of the work is actually carrying over. There are of course new opportunities that have opened up that I could not have pursued while I was at JPL. There's funding from private foundations on biomedical engineering problems that are relevant here, and that's tremendously exciting. I expect there will be other non-NASA projects that come in.

ZIERLER: What about from Stanford itself? In what ways does Stanford—speaking only of your own experiences—support junior faculty to accomplish what they want?

ARYA: Of course there is the pot of money, the startup funding, that comes with an appointment. In my case, that was instrumental in buying some of the key experimental pieces of equipment that we need in the lab. Most of the work of developing and maturing young faculty ends up happening at the department level. There are programs at the school and the university level, but because Stanford is quite a large place compared to Caltech, most of the work happens at the department level. There, most of the work is actually quite informal. I'm in a small department—15, 16 faculty—so most of my mentorship and advice comes from informal conversations with faculty, junior and senior faculty—on a per-need basis, let's say. All my colleagues are very open to me going up and asking them for advice. Occasionally we're driving to conferences or something like that together, and there's conversations that happen.

ZIERLER: Having the ongoing support from NASA and JPL, does that keep you connected? Is that just meaningful for you personally?

ARYA: Yes. It allows me to keep connected with a lot of my colleagues from JPL which is fantastic. It means that there is a level of trust and support there and a level of understanding of capability. I know what parts of the project they can and will tackle, and they know what parts of the project I can and will tackle. That's fantastic.

ZIERLER: Do you still feel like you're in building mode, either with instrumentation or graduate students? What will it look like to achieve a level of completion?

ARYA: Yeah, I'm definitely still in building mode. I've only been here a bit more than two years, like two years and a couple of months. The first year was definitely—setting up coursework was a huge portion of the work, setting up lectures and homework and exams, et cetera. The second year has really focused on establishing a diverse base of funding for the students and for the lab, and establishing research directions that are diverse enough to be sustainable over a long period of time.

ZIERLER: What are the kinds of backgrounds that the graduate students you have worked with so far—where are they coming from? What are their interests?

ARYA: I have currently three PhD students. One of them comes from MIT but has spent a portion of their time at NASA Ames working on robotic assembly of structures, so there's a common element there. They're absolutely brilliant, because they have this deep knowledge and intuition about how structures behave at these scales. Another one of my students actually used to be an intern of mine at JPL. They were a Caltech undergrad. They interned with me twice at JPL. They wrote their undergraduate thesis with Sergio. By the way, when they applied for PhD graduate school positions, they could have gone anywhere. They had offers from many, many, many places. I was really honored that they decided to come to Stanford. I just signed on as their advisor yesterday, so that's tremendously exciting and fulfilling. I'm honored that they chose to come work with me. Their background is Caltech undergrad, which is tremendous of course, and working in Sergio's lab and working at JPL. They already know—most of what I have to teach them! [laughs] There are some other students who are interested in design and optimization methods, with strong backgrounds in that.

ZIERLER: Two questions about areas that you might be getting into or you are already into. You mentioned robotics. Where is autonomy playing a role now, or where do you see your lab headed with autonomy?

ARYA: Autonomy really enables key capabilities for spacecraft. I have little interest in developing new forms of autonomy myself, primarily because I'm surrounded by excellent colleagues who are world leaders in robotics autonomy. Mac Schwager, Simone D'Amico, Marco Pavone, Mykel J. Kochenderfer—these are all professors—Grace Gao—that are doing—they're world leaders. My focus has been on collaborating with them, to understand how autonomy enables new capabilities from structures in the space domain. What does that mean? It means more efficient, more robust, more resilient space infrastructure perhaps, that could be assembled by robots in space. We talked about telescopes. It enables things like robotic rendezvous and docking in space for various structural applications. That can be very useful for many applications cases. It enables very, very flexible structures or very flexible spacecraft to be operated in a space environment. That's kind of what autonomy enables for novel structural applications.

There's the flip side, which is what are new kinds of robotic mechanisms I as a structural engineer can design that enables new things to happen with robots? There, the focus of mine has been on folding robots into tight volumes, these robots that can be built out of rigid plates that are made out of PCB materials, populated with electronics, and they collapse down into a flat-pack state and unfold themselves. That enables new capabilities for robotic applications, new kinds of rovers. Ingenuity was I think a fantastic example of what you can do if you have a little bit of spare volume and mass on a planetary lander and you put something new and interesting and cool there. With flat-packed robots, perhaps you could have not one Ingenuity but ten Ingenuities in the same volume. That's kind of what the interface between autonomy and my work looks like.

ZIERLER: You mentioned some possible areas of collaboration—maybe they're already underway—in biotech. Is there a nano-origami research direction for you?

ARYA: Not for me. There is nano-origami in the field that people are working on. There are many researchers who are working on nanofabrication methods, or using origami to do nanofabrication, I guess. Nanofabrication excels at making structures on flat plane sheets. If you make folds and cuts in them using origami and kirigami, you can get these flat things to be non-flat and adopt three-dimensional shapes. That is tremendously exciting. While there are nanofabrication capabilities sort of like KNI at Stanford, right now that's not something I'm moving towards. I feel like that would be spreading myself too thin. But I am aware of these developments.

The Dream of a Moon Telescope

ZIERLER: The idea of building a lunar telescope, of course this is super exciting. It combines the best of both worlds of land-based astronomy and space-based astronomy. What do you see as your contribution if something like that happens?

ARYA: The kind of telescope we're thinking about right now is a radio telescope. It works kind of like the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico. This was a parabolic radio dish on top of a mountain in Puerto Rico that was built into a depression on the mountain. We would envision using a natural crater on the Moon and putting a big parabolic radio dish in that natural crater. The challenge is one of cost and efficiency. Of course we can launch many, many rockets to the Moon and put all the material we need to put this radio dish up there, but that would be very, very expensive, perhaps prohibitively so. My contribution has been really towards, can we come up with lightweight structural designs that get the job done without literally a ton of mass? And can these lightweight designs then be erected by teams of robots? That's really my contribution there, is making it lightweight and making it be un-foldable and erectable by teams of robots.

ZIERLER: What's the timeframe? When might this happen?

ARYA: This was work that was funded by NASA's crazy ideas division—it's called NIAC, NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts—which funds ideas that may not happen in the short or medium timeframe. We are starting to transition out of NASA NIAC funding. Because of the renewed focus of lunar exploration, we're pushing to get this idea infused into upcoming mission concepts. The primary scientific driver for this big radio telescope is to observe radio waves coming from what are called the dark ages of the universe—very, very early parts of the universe which cannot be observed through any other means. So, we have to put it in kind of a radio quiet place outside of Earth's atmosphere which blocks these waves. Right now, there are many, many different concepts for studying these radio waves on the lunar surface, of which ours is one. At some point there is going to be an evaluation and a trade study of which idea is in fact the most achievable.

ZIERLER: Manan, I'll bring the conversation right up to the present. How much of a broadening out are you doing at this stage in your career versus—it's very early on for you at Stanford—and how much is it a focus for what you came in with your strengths? How do you achieve those balances?

ARYA: I don't have a complete answer to that. It's still under development. The thinking has been as follows. There is a danger to spreading yourself too thin as you prepare yourself for a tenure review. That's something to be cautious about. The primary focus will remain on space applications and shape-changing structures. The broadening is a smaller piece of the pie or a smaller piece of the puzzle. Its job is to be exploratory and to diversify the research potential. There are applications, there are terrestrial, on-the-ground applications for the kind of work we do. I'm trying to prepare our lab to do that kind of work but without it being the sole focus or even a large focus. That's the way I'm thinking about it.

Need as the Basis for Technology Development

ZIERLER: Manan, for the last part of our talk I'll ask a few retrospective questions, and then we'll end looking to the future. Really wide-angle question—what have you learned about the interplay of the development of new technologies and how those lead to new ideas, and then conversely the development of new ideas and how those lead to new technologies? What is your perspective on that?

ARYA: In my view, a lot of the new technology development ends up being driven by need. I think very few successful new technology development efforts work in a vacuum. There's always something that has to be requiring that new technology to exist or needing that new technology to exist. That's what I have seen. In terms of new ideas, new ideas for new concepts and new research directions and new methods and new schemes, those are—everywhere. They are very, very easy to come by, let's say. It's very easy to have a new idea. The trick has always been, for me at least—how do you predict if a new idea is going to pan out? There's a level of intuitiveness and a level of intuition and a level of experience that I don't currently feel I fully have. I don't know if an idea is going to pan out. But I do know the ideas that excite me. [laughs] That's something that's innate and that comes from within. That's a direction I've been following, kind of a follow-your-nose kind of thing. That's how I've been doing it.

ZIERLER: On the question of the ideas that excite you, the ideas that animate you, do you separate out in your mind or do you think differently about the motivations when what you're working on is really about the technology demonstration and showing what the materials can do, versus how these could be used for discovery, for science?

ARYA: Definitely. There is a needs-based invention that happens. Somebody needs a large starshade-like structure. How do I make that happen? Somebody needs a multilayer radio lens to work. How do I make that happen? Then there are more questions unmotivated by technological need. Can I make an origami structure that unfolds itself? Can I make origami on curved surfaces? Can I fold up a sphere using origami? Those have no immediate technological drivers for needs, but to me they are tremendously interesting questions. I can't tell you why they're tremendously interesting; they're just fun! Nobody has answers to them, and it would be cool to find out the answer! [laughs] We'll find out [laughs] if that's a winning strategy or not.

ZIERLER: The humorous disconnect between your lack of academic focus, your lack of academic ambition—here you are as a Stanford professor. What's the takeaway?

ARYA: The disappointing takeaway, actually, is that there's a huge component of what we might call success that depends on luck. I was very lucky. I was of course prepared. All my academic training and everything put me in a position where I could afford to take advantage of opportunities as they arose But the opportunities that arose were driven by chance events that could have gone some other way. It is kind of bizarre to find yourself stumbling into a position like this, but there's a part of me that thinks that surely this must happen to everybody else who is in this position, or to very many people who are in this position.

ZIERLER: Last question, looking to the future. Now that you're two or three years in, soon enough you're going to have your first crop of graduate students who are going to go off and build their own careers. In terms of your own style as a mentor, what you learned from Sergio, how much are you going to let the students define what your lab becomes, and where is it really your job to maintain control over those definitions?

ARYA: I really don't think I have a choice in shaping the culture of the lab. It will be largely defined by the first graduate students. It's a collaborative effort. I see my students as not "my students"; they are collaborators. They are fellow scientists who are learning with me. It would be very hard for them not to shape the lab and what it becomes. I'm not even attempting to affect that. Of course I want to create a lab that is welcoming and safe and open to a lot of people. That, I'm insistent about—that we give space to everybody who wants to join. That openness is something that I am insisting on. If I insist on openness, then I can't also simultaneously say things are going to happen only my way. That's definitely something that is in the forefront. There was something else I wanted to say, but it slipped my mind.

ZIERLER: Given your interest in the importance—not even having a choice, as you say, in terms of defining it, because it's so central to what the students want to do—what are you seeing so far? How can you extrapolate based on what's happening now, in terms of their interests, their motivations?

ARYA: I will get to that question. I just remembered what I wanted to say. The other area that of course I have a responsibility, to make sure the lab proceeds correctly, is to teach them not only what I know about structural mechanics, et cetera, et cetera, but also to make sure that we are engaged in the scientific endeavor to the highest standards—we're doing good work, we're writing good papers. To maintain a degree of technical excellence, really, and to enforce that—that is definitely a responsibility that I take very seriously. In terms of what I have seen going on right now and what I see moving forward in terms of what the lab is shaping like in terms of interests, so far I have been very, very lucky with the kind of graduate students who have chosen to join the lab. They are the sort of people who are intellectually curious, very motivated, and amazingly brilliant. I'm hoping that continues. In terms of the culture of the lab, I think it has really been set by the first few members, and it's very open and very welcoming. I'm hoping that continues. I'm hoping that the entire lab continues seeing each other not only as scientific collaborators and engineering collaborators but also as humans, and extending a dose of empathy [laughs] to each other when they can.

ZIERLER: This has been a wonderful conversation. I want to thank you so much for spending this time with me.

ARYA: Thank you, David.

[END]