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Natasha Bosanac
Assistant Professor, Smead Aerospace
Friday, Sept. 27 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 114

Abstract: Our future in space involves miniaturized satellites for low-cost and rapid access to space, autonomously navigating spacecraft, on-orbit servicing for sustainability, in-space assembly of critical infrastructure, formations for multi-point measurements, and spacecraft visiting the farthest reaches of our solar system. Across this wide array of architectures, form factors, and destinations is a common thread: spacecraft operating within multi-body gravitational systems. These systems possess a chaotic solution space that has challenged several astrodynamics tasks, including 1) sufficiently understanding the broad array of possible motions for a spacecraft; 2) designing complex and constrained trajectories that exist across a diverse trade space; 3) generating digestible predictions of the possible future motions of an object; and 4) automating all these tasks to reduce operational costs and support autonomous decision-making. This talk will present selected recent contributions from my research group to address these challenges by developing new trajectory analysis, design, and prediction strategies for spacecraft operating in multi-body systems.

Bio: Natasha Bosanac is an Assistant Professor in the Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the Â鶹ӰԺ. She earned her S.B. in Aerospace Engineering from MIT in 2010. Then, she earned her M.S.A.A. and Ph.D. in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue University in 2012 and 2016, respectively, with a focus on astrodynamics. Her research group works to advance trajectory design, analysis, and prediction strategies within multi-body systems through a combination of dynamical systems theory, machine learning, data mining, and path planning techniques.