Gabriella Gaias

I received both my MEng (2005) and PhD (2009) in Aerospace Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
Since 2009, I have been working as a Research Engineer in the Space Flight Technology Department at the DLR’s German Space Operations Center (GSOC). My working activities focus on development of AOCS/GNC algorithms, simulation systems, and flight software for formation-flying and proximity operations applications.
I have been involved into the PRISMA formation-flying mission as flight operations GNC engineer and as experiment developer (ARGON – 2012).
I acted as Principal Investigator for the AVANTI experiment – flown in late 2016 on the BIROS satellite – following its design, development, integration, and operation.
I joined the ERC H2020 COMPASS project in April 2018.

Current research within COMPASS

  • Semi-analytical techniques applied to the relative motion
  • Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) algorithms for formation-flying

Other research

  • DLR/GSOC AVANTI (Autonomous Vision Approach Navigation and Target Identification) – flown on BIROS
  • DLR/GSOC ARGON (Advanced Rendezvous Demonstration using Global Positioning System and Optical Navigation) – flown on PRISMA