Mid-Atlantic Section AIAA
Council Meeting Minutes
February 10, 2011
Robin Vaughan, Secretary
February 10, 2011 APL Main Cafeteria Laurel, MD 6:30 PM
Attendees:
Section council officers: Carolyn Slivinski, Andrea Kodys, Sarah Haack, Surya Raghu,
Robin Vaughan
Others: Ron McCandless, Kate Stambaugh, Vinny Ramachandran, Jack Koletty
Meeting minutes from the last council meeting on 1/20/11 were approved. (These are
posted on the section AIAA SharePoint site.)
Sarah Haack presented the treasurer’s report and paper copies were circulated.
Kate Stambaugh agreed to serve as the Young Professionals chair for the section. Vinny
Ramachandran will be co-chair for YPSE 2011.
Tom Milnes was unable to attend the meeting, but he did send out an e-mail report on his
activities. The paper airplane contest was successful and well supported. The electric
cargo challenge will be held on February 12.
Tom Milnes has been working to recruit a new set of candidates for section officers for
2011-2012. The council approved his proposed slate:
Chair – Andrea Kodys
Vice Chair – Ron McCandless
Secretary – Robin Vaughan
Treasurer – Sarah Haack
We will send out a call for other nominations to the section membership via e-mail.
Surya Raghu reviewed plans for future section programs. He has arranged a talk on
February 23 at APL for Engineers Week. The speakers will be Steve Benner from
Goddard talking about the GOES spacecraft and Rob Decker from APL talking about the
Voyager interstellar mission. He has confirmed that the local counselor for the Indian
space program is available to talk during the last week of March or the first week of
April. He is also working to get speakers from the Japanese, Chinese, and French space
programs. Robin will confirm the dates that Parsons auditorium is available. Raghu will
forward names and affiliations to Robin so she can submit the paperwork for foreign
visitors to APL.
Marvine Hamner is still interested in putting together a program around the film on
women aviators called “Breaking through the Clouds.” Kate has some contacts with the
local SWE chapter and she will check on organizing a joint program with them. Jack
suggested that Sheila Widnall from MIT would be good speaker to go with the film
showing. She is also a possible key note speaker for YPSE.
Jack Koletty reported on plans for programs for the NCS SSTC (National Capitol Section
Space Systems Technical Committee) for the rest of the year. John Malay is now helping
him to organize the program on UAVs at the Naval Academy sometime in April. The
Town Hall program is being done with the northern Virginia section and NASA
Headquarters. They plan to hold this at George Washington University to help attract
attendance from students in the area.
Andrea reported on progress in sponsoring a prize at the Baltimore Science Fair. The
section will award 1 prize for a middle school project and 1 prize for a high school
project in the fair. The section approved cash awards in the amount of $100 for each prize
($200 total). Each winner will also receive a certificate and be invited to present their
project at the YPSE conference in the fall. Andrea received 7 responses from members
who volunteered to be judges and would like to get 2-3 additional judges. The fair will be
held on the weekend of March 26-27 and judges will need to stay at least for the morning
(8 AM to noon) to select our award winners and all day if judging the full fair (8 AM to 4
PM). We will develop a form with the criteria for choosing our award winner in each
group. We may also provide a light breakfast for our judges on the morning of the fair.
Carolyn reported that the Delaware Section is sponsoring a team for the YP Rocket
Competition and they say we are supposed to be co-sponsors. Andrea and Carolyn will
follow up on this. The competition is scheduled for April in Culpepper, VA.
Carolyn continues to work on arrangements for the field trip to Wallops Island facility on
April 15. The Hampton Roads section will be participating in this tour with us; they are
geographically closer to Wallops than we are. We need to work on the logistics on getting
one bus to take all attendees from both sections (where to pick up each group, etc). The
cost of a bus is estimated to be around $700 so we need to get good attendance to cover
the costs. A fee of $10 per person seems reasonable for transportation. Carolyn has
received the itinerary from Wallops. The tour will start at 11 AM, visit the range control
center, break for lunch, then visit the balloon lab and the sounding rockets area. We need
to start advertising this event and also check on what security checks, citizenship
restrictions, and what form of ID is required to enter Wallops.
Barbara Leary has sent out the proposed forms for Engineer and Engineering Manager of
the Year award nominations. She will resend these for comments from the section
officers and then have Tom send the request for nominations to the section once the
forms are approved.
We discussed plans for Congressional Visits Day (CVD) coming up in March. Jim
Lesikar will lead our CVD delegation for 2011. He has gotten the information from
AIAA headquarters and has participated in a telecon on the issues to be discussed for this
year’s visits. Carolyn, Tom Milnes, and Cindy Edgerton plan to attend. We need to
recruit more volunteers for the team. There is a web site where volunteers can sign up.
Andrea has been working on the contest to design a new logo for the section. She passed
around a flyer to advertise the contest. She will make some small changes and distribute
the updated version via e-mail for comment and final approval. We discussed choosing
an appropriate prize for the contest. Some suggestions were a trip to Hershey Park in
Pennsylvania, a digital camera, a hand-held video camera, or gift cards for dinner at a
nice restaurant. We agreed that $200 was the limit for the value of the prize. It was
suggested that we could get the new logo printed on T-shirts or mugs and sell them at the
spring picnic and use them as gifts for speakers or prizes at YPSE. We also need to check
on the legal rules regarding copyrights, etc for using the winning logo.
There was some discussion on how to attract more attention to our web site. One
suggestion was to use “polling results” to get members to check in to see how other
members are responding to different postings. We could have a weekly question or topic.
Kate agreed to think about a question or topic to start this. We need to check on how the
polling features of the SharePoint site works and see what graphics are available to
capture the results. A weekly comic was also suggested.
Marvine is still interested in doing the internet game for young professionals. Carolyn has
asked our web master to restore the prototype material on this to our web site. We need to
look at this example get a better understanding of how it would work before we officially
announce it. Some questions are what to give the winner for a prize, how to determine
which person gets the correct answer first, what criteria to use to determine correct
answers, how to monitor the web site for responses on a routine basis, and whether we
need a separate web site dedicated to the game. We need to be sure we have rules in place
to keep the contest fair and impartial and also to make it manageable for us.
The next council meeting will be on the evening of March 10 at APL.
A kick-off meeting for YPSE 2011 is scheduled for Monday March 28 at Raghu’s office
in Columbia at 6:30 PM.