On the 17th of May, our Francesca Scala successfully defended her PhD thesis, “Multiple satellites formation flying for earth observation applications in low Earth orbit”, at Politecnico di Milano. Her research defines a mission design technique to enable future distributed multi-satellite systems for high-resolution interferometry. Furthermore, her work proposes a methodology for guidance, navigation and control algorithms for a fast and reliable simulation of the system performances. The significance of her study relies on the flexibility of the developed methodology, which can be applied to several multiple-spacecraft formation concepts, not only in the Earth observation field.
During her PhD, Francesca spent six months at the European Space Agency (ESA/ESTEC) and attended several international conferences to present her research. Francesca was supervised by Prof. Camilla Colombo and Dr Gabriella Gaias, and her research was co-funded by the ERC COMPASS project and the ESA/ESTEC’s FFLAS mission concept study. Furthermore, during her period in ESA/ESTEC, she was mentored and supervised by Dr Manuel Martin-Neira and Berthyl Duesmann, who gave her meaningful feedback on her research.
