POSTECH Professor Junsuk Rho’s Team Develops the World’s First Multi-Frequency Elastic Wave Control Technology.

With the advances in smart materials and structures, integrated sensors and actuators, and AI technologies, the smart aircraft is becoming a new generation emergent and disruptive aeronautical technology. Based on the international symposium on Smart Aircraft 2019, Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (CJA) organized the first special topic on smart aircraft 1.0 published in 2021.

Powered descent is the make-or-break phase for pinpoint soft landing, yet fuel and mass uncertainties can derail optimized trajectories. A new study, published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2025.103914), proposes a worst-case robust convex-optimization approach plus receding-horizon closed-loop guidance to keep trajectories feasible and improve landing accuracy under adverse mass variations.

The accelerated evolution of space technology has elevated the importance of high power and lightweight attributes in satellite design. In response to the conflict between the demand for large-scale, high-power payloads and the need for lightweight, compact platforms, flexible space origami membrane structures have emerged as a potential solution. These structures possess the ability to overcome the limitations of traditional deployable mechanisms. Their geometric reconfiguration capabilities, characterized by high folding ratios, effectively satisfy the high-power performance demands.

A long-standing idea in planetary science is that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history could have delivered a major share of Earth’s water. A new study argues that the Moon’s surface record sets a hard limit on that possibility: even under generous assumptions, late meteorite delivery since about 4 billion years ago could only have supplied a small fraction of Earth’s water.

Space debris poses a risk to humans when it falls out of orbit and plunges toward the ground, but can be difficult to track after entering the Earth's atmosphere. Using already established networks of earthquake-detecting seismometers, scientists have developed a new tracking method that generates more detailed information in near real-time than authorities have today—information that will help to quickly locate and retrieve the charred and sometimes toxic remains.