Large membrane structures for scientific remote sensing and space exploration

As part of the NASA Flod L. Thompson Fellowship, I spent four months in the begining of 2005 at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) in Barcelona, Spain. During this visit, I had many opportunities to discuss the new NASA Space Exploration Program with graduate students and faculty at CIMNE, and worked closely with several researchers focusing on the modeling and analysis of thin-film membranes. Here a brief overview of the space exploration technologies that use very large strcutural membranes is presented, together with some comments related tocomputational mechanics issues for simulating the response of large membrane structures