On the 26th of February, Marco Nugnes had his PhD Defence at Politecnico di Milano, where he successfully defended his PhD thesis “Design of low-thrust trajectories through differential dynamic programming enhancing the effects or orbital perturbations”. His research is focused on the definition of a theory to explain the coupling between the use of orbital elements as state representation of the dynamics and the differential dynamic programming as optimisation technique. Another relevant topic is the definition of a cost function to minimise the time spent by the satellite during the transfer whenever an eclipse phenomenon occurs.
During his PhD, Marco has spent six months at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), attended and presented at several international conferences. Marco thanks his supervisor Prof. Camilla Colombo and Politecnico di Milano for this opportunity and the COMPASS project for funding his research. He would also thank Dr. Gregory Lantoine for being a perfect mentor during his visiting research period at NASA JPL, and Prof. Lorenzo Casalino and Prof. Giulio Avanzini for taking time to review his thesis and giving him meaningful feedback.
