Marco Nugnes, from the COMPASS team, is spending six months of his PhD at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory under the Visiting Student Research Program (JVSRP), where he will work on his PhD research supervised by Camilla Colombo on low-thrust trajectory optimisation using the technique of the differential dynamic programming.
Marco has joined the Outer Planet Mission Analysis (392M) section, to work under the supervision of Dr. Gregory Lantoine on the optimization of low-thrust, many revolutions, perturbed trajectories via Differential Dynamic Programming. This will allow to gain new insights on the application of this numerical technique for the design of interplanetary and planetary trajectories. Possible applications of Marco’s work cover the orbit raising of GNSS constellations like Galileo, Oneweb and Starlink.