On the 11th of June, our Xiaodong Lu successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Luni-solar perturbations enhanced post mission disposal for spacecraft in Highly Elliptical Orbits”, at @Politecnico di Milano to be awarded the doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering.
His research, supervised by @camillacolombo from @Polimi, developed a novel framework for post-mission disposal design for HEO spacecraft. Main outcomes of his work are the remarkable reduction of computational time of post-mission disposal manoeuvre optimisation, the systematic algorithms to average disturbing functions, and the development of a triple-averaged propagator using Laplace plane as a reference plane. His PhD program is funded by China Scholarship Council (CSC) and his research also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) as part of COMPASS project and as part of the GREEN SPECIES project.