It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
With natural disasters striking communities across the U.S. at an accelerating pace, the question of how to build homes that can endure them has never been more critical.
New research spanning political science and civil engineering shows that the answer could lie at the intersection of smarter regulatory systems and stronger structures. While neither approach is sufficient on its own, together they offer a promising path toward safer homes.
University of Notre Dame political scientist Susan Ostermann and civil engineering professors María J. Echeverría from California State University, Sacramento and Abbie Liel from the University of Colorado Boulder have identified the building code features that have the biggest impact on hazard resilience and translated those features into tangible, practical building solutions. The findings from their National Science Foundation-funded study were published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.
A dual approach to resilience
Ostermann and Liel say that housing resilience is both a governance issue and a technical problem. Building codes, as written, already contain nearly everything one needs to build safe homes — but in many places, implementation remains a barrier.
“Regulations support the goals of safe, resilient housing, but they can also get in the way,” said Ostermann, associate professor of global affairs and political science at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. “We need to understand how culture and local building practices interact with regulatory processes.”
A locally informed approach to regulation was especially important given the site of the study: Anchorage, Alaska. Geographically isolated from the continental U.S., its independent-minded population often distrusts governmental rules. Even after more than 750 homes were destroyed or damaged by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 2018, many Alaskans have retained their libertarian-leaning views. In other words, simply strengthening building codes does not guarantee safer construction if the codes are not followed in the first place.
“People everywhere share a desire for safe housing, but communities vary in the degree to which they regulate and enforce building codes,” Ostermann said.
A pragmatic approach to regulation
To gain local expertise on the key features of hazard-resilient housing, the researchers conducted interviews with nearly 40 experts including structural and geotechnical engineers, builders, regulators, inspectors and others. Underlying this approach is regulatory pragmatism, a concept Ostermann developed to help governments regulate more effectively in places where traditional, top-down models fail.
“It suggests that we need to understand the context in which we regulate, and that we need to design regulation for that context — which means sometimes doing things that are a little bit weird,” Ostermann said.
The sheer complexity of building code poses a challenge in and of itself.
“If you were to print it out, it's multiple volumes,” Ostermann said. “It’s too big to be comprehended by almost anybody, whether it’s the government using it or a contractor trying to meet the code.”
Because few people can realistically utilize the entire code, Ostermann and Liel argue that local officials and other stakeholders must prioritize a smaller set of features that matter most for hazard safety in their particular environment.
Engineering insights: Why homes fail and how to fix it
Echeverría and Liel’s computational structural engineering analysis showed that many homes in Alaska do not perform well in hazardous conditions because key structural elements are missing due to lack of compliance.
In many two-story homes built over large, open garages — a common design in Alaska — the mass of the second floor sits on a first floor with limited lateral support. “You’re basically missing one side of that box,” Liel said. “That overstrains the other sides and creates a twisting torsion problem, so these homes do not perform as well during an earthquake.”
Echeverría and Liel identified a list of critical structural features that should be prioritized to maximize compliance and hazard resilience:
Shear walls — walls that are designed to withstand lateral forces such as wind
Proper framing around garage openings
Hold-downs — steel connectors that anchor a wall to the foundation and keep it anchored amid shaking
Liel emphasized that these solutions are neither exotic nor expensive, but homeowners and builders often do not recognize their significance. Echeverría and Liel’s findings provided the very list of “critical features” needed to inform Ostermann’s pragmatic regulation.
Ostermann and Liel are studying housing not only in Alaska, but also in Puerto Rico, which is still rebuilding eight years after Hurricane Maria, and Lahaina, Maui, which suffered widespread damage during a 2023 wildfire.
“When communities, engineers, builders and policymakers work together, resilience stops being an abstract ideal and becomes a place people can safely make their home in,” Ostermann said. “If we keep listening, learning and adapting, we can build homes that not only endure the next disaster, but also give families the security and stability they need to plan for the future.”
Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu
Essential hazard-resistant features for seismic performance of wood-frame housing where building regulation is uneven
Article Publication Date
1-Dec-2025
SPACE/COSMOS
New report outlines science priorities for human Mars exploration
The report, commissioned by NASA and steered by scientists at Penn State, is intended to guide government and industry decision-makers and the scientific community
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As humanity prepares to take its first steps on Mars, a comprehensivereportreleased today (Dec. 9) from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and steered by scientists at Penn State lays out a detailed science strategy to guide the initial human missions to the red planet.
The report, commissioned by NASA, identifies the highest priority scientific objectives for the missions as well as proposes four distinct mission campaigns designed to maximize the scientific return of the first three human landings on Mars. The report is intended to guide government and industry decision-makers, the scientific community and the general public.
Researchers at Penn State served on the report’s steering committee as well as contributed across multiple panels, influencing the report’s scientific priorities in atmospheric science, astrobiology, biological and physical sciences and human health.
“Penn State expertise helped shape the nation’s highest priority science objectives and recommendations for human exploration of Mars,” said Andrew Read, Penn State’s senior vice president for research. “This is a thrilling moment for us as scientists. We are setting the guideposts that will transform our knowledge of Mars and, on a deeper level, our place in the cosmos. It underscores Penn State’s research excellence and the caliber of our faculty, whose vision and expertise are influencing the future of space exploration.”
The 240-page report provides a science-driven roadmap for human Mars exploration, balancing scientific goals with existing NASA mission plans and technological capacity. It is essentially a scientific playbook for the first crewed missions to Mars, describing the “what” and “why” that will guide human exploration of the red planet, explained James Pawelczyk, associate professor of physiology and kinesiology at Penn State and member of the report’s steering committee. Pawelczyk’s research focuses on neural control of circulation and human physiology in spaceflight.
“This report is considering exploration in a very different way than we have conducted human spaceflight before,” said Pawelczyk, who flew aboard the NASA STS-90 Space Shuttle mission as a payload specialist and has logged over 381 hours in space. “We are considering the science of Mars itself, its geology, but there will also be the science of being on Mars. Mars is this novel environment that people will live in — and maybe the most profound part of it is you'll look up and somewhere among the star field will be a tiny, little bluish dot and that will be Earth. This will be the farthest and the most isolated that humans have ever been.”
The comprehensive report is an evolution of NASA’s Moon to Mars Objectives — a framework that uses lunar mission to develop and test what’s needed for human exploration beyond Earth — building on the science objectives in the current framework as well as identifying goals that may be missing. A separate report will determine the high priority science objectives for the in-space phases of the crewed missions to Mars.
"Getting humans to Mars and back is a doable goal for the next 20 years,” said James Kasting, an emeritus Atherton Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, who served on the report’s steering committee and whose expertise includes atmospheric evolution and planetary atmospheres. “We have to agree about how careful we should be about planetary protection, though, both forward and backwards. I'm for making reasonable assumptions about how best to do so, assumptions that allow us to push forward."
The report details the most crucial objectives across all relevant branches of science and prioritizes the objectives into campaigns to be undertaken on the surface of Mars during the first three landings. To meet its objectives, each campaign has a roadmap that outlines equipment and other capacity requirements; landing site criteria such as areas with accessible ice or reachable caves; and key samples and measurements that must be made before human arrival on Mars, while crews are on Mars or when back on Earth. The report also considers critical parameters, such as the size of the crew or duration of time spent on the surface of Mars, and how that might impact how the campaigns are prioritized.
The top-priority objectives identified in the report are:
Determine if, in the exploration zone, evidence can be found for any of the following: habitability, indigenous extant or extinct life, and/or indigenous prebiotic chemistry
Characterize past and present water and CO2 cycles and reservoirs within the exploration zone to understand their evolution
Characterize and map the geologic record and potential niche habitats within the exploration zone to reveal Mars’s evolution and to provide geologic context to other investigations, including the study of bolide impacts, volcanic and intrusive igneous activity, the sedimentary record, landforms and volatiles, including liquids and ices
Determine the longitudinal impact of the integrated Martian environment on crew physiological, cognitive and emotional health, including team dynamics and confirm effectiveness of countermeasures
Determine what controls the onset and evolution of major dust storms, which dominate present-day atmospheric variability
Characterize the Martian environment for in situ resource utilization (ISRU) and determine the applications associated with the ISRU processing, ultimately for the full range of materials supporting permanent habitation but with an early focus on water and propellants
Determine whether the integrated Martian environment affects reproduction or the functional genome across multiple generations in at least one model plant species and one model animal species
Determine throughout the mission whether microbial population dynamics and species distribution in biological systems and habitable volumes are stable and are not detrimental to astronaut health and performance
Characterize the effects of Martian dust on human physiology and hardware lifetime
Determine the longitudinal impact of the integrated Martian environment on plant and animal physiology and development across multiple generations where possible as part of an integrated ecosystem of plants, microbes and animals
Characterize the primary and secondary radiation at key locations in the crew habitat and astrobiological sampling sites to contextualize sample collection and improve models of future mission risk
“This has been a dream and an honor to conduct this report for the nation,” said Pawelczyk, who explained that the team reached out to hundreds of subject matter experts to collect information for the report. “If we’re successful, humans will have set foot on another planetary body, on another planet, for the first time. And the message we’re sending with this report is that science comes with us.”
Other researchers affiliated with Penn State contributed to the report. Laura Rodriguez, staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute who earned her doctorate at Penn State, served as member of the Panel on Astrobiology. Bruce Link, chief science officer for Amentum, earned his doctorate at Penn State and served as a member of the Biological and Physical Sciences and Human Factors panel. Katherine Freeman, Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, served as a reviewer, providing an independent review of the report draft, evaluating quality and scientific rigor.
A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars
Article Publication Date
9-Dec-2025
K-DRIFT pathfinder: A compact telescope for observing faint galactic structures
Researchers have developed an off-axis freeform three-mirror telescope designed to reveal extremely faint, low-surface-brightness structures surrounding galaxies
SPIE--International Society for Optics and Photonics
Image of the Galaxy NGC 5907 captured by the K-DRIFT Pathfinder. The yellow region marks an area 1.5 times brighter than the background noise level, while the red arrow points to a faint low-surface-brightness structure—remnant of a past gravitational interaction between galaxies.
According to modern cosmology, most galaxies are surrounded by faint, extended halos of light called LSB structures. These subtle features are remnants of past galactic events—such as collisions, mergers, and tidal interactions—and hold important clues to galactic evolution.
However, LSB features are extremely faint, often dimmer than the night sky itself, making them difficult to capture. Traditional telescopes face challenges such as stray light, sky brightness gradients, and light scattering, which blur faint details. Deep LSB imaging therefore requires an optical design that provides a wide, unobscured field of view, fast light collection, and minimal stray light, combined with specialized observing and calibration techniques.
To overcome these challenges, a new study published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems introduced a linear-astigmatism-free three-mirror system (LAF-TMS), known as the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) Deep Rolling Imaging Fast Telescope (K-DRIFT). “Unlike traditional on-axis optical designs, off-axis unobscured designs reduce light loss, stray light, and the effect of the extended wings of the point spread function. The K-DRIFT design also eliminates linear astigmatism, a major issue in typical off-axis systems, and minimizes higher-order aberrations with its three freeform mirrors,” said author Gayoung Lee of KASI.
The optical design of K-DRIFT pathfinder features a 300-millimeter aperture confocal off-axis system with three freeform mirrors. Specifically, a freeform elliptical convex secondary mirror, termed M2, shares its focal point with both a freeform elliptical concave primary mirror M1 and a freeform elliptical concave tertiary mirror, M3. This setup effectively reduces stray light and scattering, producing sharper images. The tilt angles of the three mirrors eliminate linear astigmatism, and the use of three freeform mirrors minimizes higher order aberrations. The telescope uses a CMOS camera for detection.
The mirrors were made from Zerodur, a glass-ceramic material resistant to thermal deformation, and mounted on an aluminum housing with invar flexures that reduce mechanical stress. This setup minimizes mirror surface distortion and light scattering. The mirrors were aligned and integrated step-by-step using a coordinate-measuring machine. To further reduce stray light, a secondary baffle was placed in front of the detector.
For performance evaluation, the K-DRIFT pathfinder was installed at the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory (BOAO) for on-sky testing from June 2021 to April 2022. The telescope maintained consistent imaging performance across seasonal temperature changes but initially did not meet the required resolution target—measured as the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the point spread function (PSF).
Through a series of optical simulations, the researchers identified three main error sources: mirror fabrication errors, opto-mechanical mirror mounting errors, and optical misalignment errors. Based on this analysis, the researchers addressed the errors by replacing mirror M2 and refining the alignment process during the final assembly of the housing. As a result, K-DRIFT’s performance significantly improved, with PSF FWHM decreasing from 3.8 pixels to 1.8 pixels.
“The K-DRIFT pathfinder proves that compact, freeform mirror designs can achieve the precision needed to study the faintest structures in the universe like LSB structures. In future, this project will help trace the hidden history of how galaxies formed and evolved,” Lee said.
Overall, the K-DRIFT pathfinder marks a significant step forward in deep LSB imaging, paving the way for uncovering the faintest structures in the universe.
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Computer Engineer and TREx Product Owner Brian Cassidy (left), and Lt. Col. Brian Kester (right) from Space Systems Command (SSC) complete the transfer of the Transmit/Receive Enterprise (TREx) service from NRL to SSC in El Segundo, California, August 7, 2025. TREx was developed at NRL and will now support the broader U.S. Space Force enterprise. (U.S. Navy photo)
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Spacecraft Engineering Department recently developed the Transmit/Receive Enterprise (TREx) service with sponsorship from the Space Development Agency, Space Rapid Capabilities Office, and Space Systems Command to provide software development and mission operations for sponsoring organizations across the space community.
The TREx service provides secure access to various government and commercial antenna networks, which dramatically increases the amount of time satellites can be in contact with ground stations. This enables the satellite missions to operate more effectively by downlinking more data from space, and to recover faster if the satellite experiences an anomaly.
“Every satellite operations team we work with wishes they had more contact time with their space vehicles. We knew there were underutilized government and commercial antennas available, but we needed to build a service to broker access in a secure way for DoW missions.” said Keith Akins, NRL aerospace engineer and government technical lead on TREx “We have already seen a huge impact to satellite missions operating at NRL, and now missions across the USSF can onboard to the service.”
In 2022, TREx was the first cloud-native information system to receive an Authority to Operate (ATO) from the U.S. Space Force. Since then, TREx has been serving dozens of satellites on orbit with 24/7 “lights out” automated operations and has brokered over 90,000 antenna reservations and 700,000 minutes of satellite contacts from antennas all over the globe. The TREx design enables satellite missions to quickly and easily access new ground stations as they are added to the service.
The U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command’s (SSC) new Space Domain Awareness and Battle Management System Delta 85 (SYD 85) drives enterprise integration and modernization of tactical level Command, Control, and Communications (C3) capabilities to transform satellite operations and create a resilient C3 enterprise for the warfighter. SYD 85 and NRL have partnered for over a year coordinating a smooth transition of TREx from being managed at NRL to the acquisition office of the Space Force.
“This is exactly the type of lab-to-operations success we strive for,” said Col. Patrick Little, SYD 85 Space Access & Networked Services System Program Director. “The TREx system brings enhanced flexibility and efficiency to our antenna services, directly supporting our mission to deliver integrated, resilient capabilities to the field.”
The NRL TREx project included participation from a variety of industry partners, including Space/Ground System Solutions (SGSS), Artic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) Federal, Sphinx Defense, Systems Security Engineering Group (SS3G), RBC Signals, Amazon Web Services, ViaSat, and Swedish Space Corp.
“We are fortunate at NRL to be able to use our own satellites and antennas at the Blossom Point Tracking Facility to test and mature TREx,” said Brian Cassidy, NRL computer engineer and TREx product owner. “We started with a napkin sketch and recruited a one-of-a-kind team to deliver a production service supporting daily satellite operations. It’s a win for the DOW space community to transition TREx from a research lab directly into operations.”
As of August 2025, NRL has transitioned TREx to SYD 85, where TREx will onboard additional satellite missions and serve the broader U.S. Space Force enterprise as part of the Joint Antenna Marketplace (JAM). JAM is a secure, cloud-based marketplace that connects satellite operations centers with commercial and government antennas worldwide.
The NRL Spacecraft Engineering Division designs, builds, and operates pioneering and innovative spacecraft and space systems. The division functions as a prototype laboratory for new and operationally relevant space-based capabilities. From cradle to grave, the division provides expertise in mission design, systems design and engineering, and hardware expertise for every aspect of a space system.
The division has a history of transitioning advanced technologies into operations and industry, applying expertise in systems integration, design and verification, dynamics and control systems, electronics and software, and mission operations to develop advanced space technologies.
About the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
NRL is a scientific and engineering command dedicated to research that drives innovative advances for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps from the seafloor to space and in the information domain. NRL is located in Washington, D.C. with major field sites in Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Key West, Florida; Monterey, California, and employs approximately 3,000 civilian scientists, engineers and support personnel.
For more information, contact NRL Corporate Communications at (202) 480-3746 or nrlpao@us.navy.mil. Please reference package number at top of press release.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory recently developed the Transmit/Receive Enterprise (TREx) service with sponsorship from the Space Development Agency, Space Rapid Capabilities Office, and Space Systems Command. The TREx service provides secure access to various government and commercial antenna networks, which dramatically increases the amount of time satellites can be in contact with ground stations. This enables the satellite missions to operate more effectively by downlinking more data from space, and to recover faster if the satellite experiences an anomaly. (Provided by U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)
