Aerospace Engineering. — The former Department of Aeronautical Engineering has grown dramatically, especially in graduate programs and associated research activity. After World War II the large enrollment of Air Force officers in guided missiles and astronautics graduate programs strengthened the courses in guidance and control, instrumentation, high-speed aerodynamics, and rocket engines. The breadth of research activity now includes research on the upper atmosphere through instrumentation of sounding rockets and satellites, experimental and theoretical research in gas dynamics, research in the areas of automatic control, computers, and communications systems, and in solid mechanics.
In 1968 the graduate program in Information and Control Engineering, established in the early 1950s, became a part of the interdepartmental program in Computer, Information, and Control Engineering. Upper-atmosphere research contributed to the interdepartmental graduate degree program in aeronomy (the study of planetary atmospheres). Research in gas dynamics led to courses concerned with improving the atmospheric environment.
The University of Michigan, an Encyclopedic Survey Supplement, Page 131.
