Research

Analysis of Rotational Habitat Atmosphere Dynamics

May 2025 - December 2025

Over the summer and fall of 2025, I have had the opportunity to work under Eric Comstock and Dr. Romero-Calvo in Georgia Tech’s Low Gravity Science and Technology (LGST) lab, on the rotational habitat atmosphere analysis project. This project analyzes the ability of a Ringworld to retain its atmosphere over time, with the ultimate goal of determining the lifetime of such a structure.

A Ringworld, first contrived by the science-fiction author Larry Niven, is a type of megastructure, shaped like a ring around the sun, with a cross sectional shape of a U, with the inside facing the sun. The ring would essentially lay on a circularized version of Earth’s orbital path, and as such have a radius of one astronomical unit, or 150 million kilometers. Since the atmosphere (and humans) would exist on the inside of the U, there exists a potential for the atmosphere to leak out the top of the Ringworld.

Our analysis focused on the top of the Ringworld, where the atmosphere was collisionless. Within this regime, we used Monte Carlo methods to generate the particles, with a species composition based on Earth’s atmosphere at 218 kilometers and speeds based on the Maxwell-Boltzman distribution. The particles underwent forces, both fictitious ones caused by the rotation of the Ringworld (centrifugal and Coriolis), as well as real ones caused by Lorentz effects and solar gravity. The accelerations and velocities are then used to integrate the equations of motion for the particles and determine their positions over their lifetime.

In my first semester, I began by making some quality of life changes to the codebase, and becoming acquainted with how the code worked and ran. As I began to understand our system more, I began to investigate the effects of solar wind on the particles. I created a method for generating particles of different species, based on the atmospheric composition of Earth, shown below:

As we moved into the fall, I rejoined the project, and was promoted to be the leader of the solar wind team. As such, I led myself and two of my colleagues, Subhan Ali and McKenzie Prince into further investigation of the electromagnetic effects on charged, upper-atmosphere particles. Throughout the semester we analyzed the strength and direction of the magnetic field caused by Parker Spirals around the sun, calculated the acceleration component of the particle caused by Lorentz forces, and integrated these new ideas into the existing code.

As the semester went on we moved from the code fundamentals to a combination of paper writing and examining secondary effects. We examined the effects of the solar plasma, observing and accounting for the floating potential of the Ringworld caused by the interactions within the quasi-neutral plasma of the solar wind.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Georgia Tech’s LGST. Exposure to the world of professional academia and research was eye-opening for me, and introduced me to a field that I am eager to explore more. As an undergraduate research assistant, I was fortunate to improve my skills in python code development, Monte Carlo methods, and electromagnetic effects. As a team leader I gained experience in repo management, integration into existing, complex systems, and organizing a team to maximize everyone’s strengths and support each other. I look forward to continuing to help Eric’s team, and to our imminent publishing

Lunar Power Beaming

January 2026 - May 2026

More information coming soon!