Friday, Sept. 13
10:40 a.m. - Seminar in AERO 120
11:30 a.m. - Panel Discussion / Q&A in AERO 111

This seminar will recount the two-year proximity operations and remote sensing campaign at Bennu, including the dramatic sample collection event and the events leading to the landing of the sample capsule in Utah.

A panel discussion will follow, featuring members of the Navigation and Flight Operations Team from NASA Goddard, Lockheed Martin, and KinetX, who will each recount specific challenges faced during the mission and the innovations that were implemented to overcome them.

Featured Speakers:

Dr. Michael C Moreau (AeroEngr MS’97, PhD’01) has worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center since 2001, and for over 10 years has served in leadership roles on the OSIRIS-REx Mission, as the manager of the Navigation Team during development, launch, and Bennu encounter, then as deputy project manager and leader of the sample return capsule recovery team. Mike’s Ph.D. research at CU focused on applications of the Global Positioning System in high Earth orbits, and contributed to the adoption of GPS on NASA missions such as GOES and Magnetosphere Multiscale. Before attending CU, he earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Vermont.

Over three decades, Dr. Peter Antreasian (AeroEngr PhD’92) has made contributions to the navigation of NASA missions, Galileo, NEAR, Mars Odyssey, MER, Cassini-Huygens, GRAIL, and OSIRIS-REx. He began his career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1992, then joined KinetX 20 years later to lead the OSIRIS-REx navigation team. His expertise in orbit determination and navigation has been crucial in the success of these missions, including the first-ever landing of a spacecraft on an asteroid and the return of an asteroid sample to Earth. Peter earned his BS, MS and PhD in Aerospace Engineering, respectively, from Purdue, University of Texas and University of Colorado.

Dr. Jason Leonard (AeroEngr MS’12, PhD’15) received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder under the advisement of Dr. George Born. Currently, he is the Orbit Determination Group Supervisor at KinetX Aerospace and Deputy Navigation Team Chief for the NASA OSIRIS-REx and OSIRIS-APEX missions. He has been the Orbit Determination Team Lead for OSIRIS-REx since prior to Launch, during the duration of proximity operations and its successful acquisition of asteroid regolith, and through its return of the sample to Earth. For his contributions to the mission, Jason received the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal and the PI Award of Distinction.

Dr. Daniel Wibben is the Maneuver Design Group Supervisor for the Space Navigation and Flight Dynamics practice at KinetX Aerospace, Inc. Since joining the company, he has held the role of Maneuver and Trajectory lead for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. He has also been involved with the planning and operations of the LUCY, LunaH-Map, and DAVINCI missions. He received his B.S. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona where his research was focused on nonlinear guidance techniques for asteroid proximity operations and planetary landing.

Coralie D. Adam (AeroEngr MS’17) is the Optical Navigation Group Supervisor at KinetX. She holds a B.S. in aerospace engineering and astronomy from the University of Illinois, and an M.S. in aerospace engineering sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder. During her 12 years at KinetX, Coralie has had lead roles on the navigation teams for NASA’s New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx, Lucy, and OSIRIS-APEX missions. In addition to leading the OSIRIS-REx optical navigation subsystem from development through sample collection, she co-convened the scientific investigation of Bennu’s active particle ejection phenomena. Coralie is currently the deputy Navigation Team Chief on NASA’s Lucy mission, and a navigation lead and science co-investigator on the OSIRIS-APEX extended mission to asteroid Apophis.

Ryan Olds (AeroEngr BS’04, MS’09) has 19 years of experience in Guidance Navigation and Controls at Lockheed Martin Space supporting NASA Deep Space Exploration Missions.  Ryan started his career working on the Pointing Control System for the Spitzer Space Telescope.  He developed the reaction wheel control system for the twin-spacecraft GRAIL mission and supported test, integration, launch, and operations at the Moon.  Ryan began working on OSIRIS-Rex in 2013 by developing control systems as well as the Natural Feature Tracking system which provided autonomous navigation for OSIRIS-REx during the mission’s sample acquisition phase.  Ryan is currently a Guidance, Navigation and Controls manager and continues to support Deep Space Exploration missions such as OSIRIS-REx and DAVINCI.

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Demoz Gebre-Egziabher
Professor, Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Friday, Jan. 31 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 114

Abstract: Safety-critical aerospace guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems typically rely on physical redundancy to ensure reliability. However, in emerging applications where size, weight, and power constraints limit the feasibility of hardware redundancy, alternatives are needed. This presentation explores the concept of analytical redundancy, where mathematical models are used as virtual sensors in lieu of physically redundant sensors. Using synthetic air data estimation as a case study, we will explore the issues and challenges surrounding analytical redundancy and demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. As a concrete example, we will show results from using a synthetic air data system as a backup for a pitot-static system on an unmanned aerial vehicle used in precision agriculture. In closing, we discuss open research questions that need to be addressed to advance acceptance of the concept of analytical redundancy.

Bio: Demoz Gebre-Egziabher is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. At the University of Minnesota, he teaches courses in aerospace systems and directs a research lab focusing on the design of multi-sensor navigation and attitude determination systems for aerospace vehicles.  He is the current director of the NASA/Minnesota Space Grant Consortium. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation (ION) and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).  From 1990 to 1996 he was systems engineer at NAVSEA in Washington, D.C.  

Dr. Gebre-Egziabher holds a B.S in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Arizona, a M.S in Mechanical Engineering from the George Washington University and a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University.  He is a registered professional engineer (mechanical engineering).

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The world’s largest commercial space imaging company and one of Colorado’s premier aerospace companies

Dan Smoot
CEO, Maxar Intelligence
Tuesday, Jan. 21 | 4 P.M. | AERO N240

Please join Mark Sirangelo as he welcomes Dan Smoot, the CEO of Maxar Intelligence for a discussion of his career, global space data creation and the future of space imagery and imaging technology.

Maxar (also the owner of Digital Globe and Worldview) is the operator of the most advanced commercial Earth observation constellation on orbit. It collects over 3.8 million sq km of high-res imagery every day, operates in over 85 countries with over 2,600 employees including 600+ software developers and has over 125 petabytes of data.

Since November 2023, Dan has been leading Maxar’s push to bring the geospatial industry into a new age of intelligence. For over three decades, he has helped scale some of the world’s most innovative IT companies and worked closely with the defense and intelligence communities to integrate cutting-edge technologies into national security architectures. Today, Dan is guiding Maxar’s evolution to deliver secure, software-enabled products that use the power of geospatial data and technology get mission-critical insights, faster.

Dan became CEO in November 2023. Prior to joining Maxar, he served as CEO of Riverbed Technology, where he led the IT company’s transformation from a hardware provider to a software-focused business that today serves government and commercial customers, including national security agencies and 95% of the Fortune 100. Dan had also previously served as the company’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Customer Officer throughout his tenure at the company.

Prior to Riverbed Technology, Dan held several senior roles at Salesforce, including Executive Vice President of Global Partner Sales and Executive Vice President of Market Readiness. Earlier in his career, Dan served as Senior Vice President of Global Customer Operations at VMWare and held a variety of senior sales, operations and finance roles over 13 years at Cisco. Dan earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from UC Irvine. He is a board member of the American Heart Association’s (AHA) Western Affiliate and was previously the Chairman of the AHA’s Greater Bay Area chapter.

Mark N. Sirangelo created and hosts the CU Future Insight Seminar Series as CU’s Entrepreneur-Scholar in Residence. He is the recent Chairman of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Board and the DoD’s Space Advisory Committee.  Previously he was Special Assistant to the NASA Administrator helping to develop NASA’s return to the Moon.  Mark was the founding executive and head of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems and has served as the Chief Innovation Officer of Colorado.

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Alexandre Martin
Professor of Aerospace Engineering, University of Kentucky
Friday, Jan. 24 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 114

Abstract: The Kentucky Re-entry Universal Payload System (KRUPS) provides a quick-turnaround, low-cost platform to conduct atmospheric entry experiments. KRUPS is designed to test multiple types of thermal protection systems (TPS) and scientific instrumentation. Five KRUPS capsules were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) via the NG-20 Cygnus resupply vehicle. These five capsules constitute the second Kentucky Re-entry Payload Experiment (KREPE-2) mission, each with a different heat shield TPS material. The data obtained during the mission will help with the reconstruction of the atmospheric entry environment and validation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and material response (MR) models developed at the University of Kentucky.

Bio: Alexandre Martin is the EJ Nutter Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kentucky, where he has been since 2010. He obtained a B.Sc. in Physics in 1998 from the University of Montréal (Québec, Canada), and an M.Sc.A. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from École Polytechnique, Montréal (Québec, Canada). He has worked in the field of fluid-solid interactions for the last 20 years, contributing to various scientific discipline ranging from hypersonic aerothermodynamics, plasma physics, and numerical algorithm. He is especially interested in ablation, the removal of solid material by energy exchanges. Over the years of his scientific career, he has developed and supervised computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer codes that were able to model various types of ablation. More specifically, he focuses his work on ablation of the heat shields of atmospheric entry vehicles, as part of NASA, DoD and industry funded projects.

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Panel and Q&A

Thursday, Jan. 16
5:30-6:30 p.m. • AERO 120
Free Pizza and Refreshments

Malcom Young
Sierra Space
Senior Principal Systems Engineer

Jack Elston
Black Swift Technologies
CEO and Co-Founder

Smead Aerospace invites you to attend a special workshop on the broad range of career opportunities in aerospace engineering.

Join moderator Prof. Torin Clark and two aerospace professionals who will discuss exciting and innovative accomplishments in our field, share experiences from their careers, and provide advice and guidance to your own path. 

This will be a one-hour panel with questions from the moderator and audience, followed by an open house that gives you the opportunity to interact with panelists one-on-one.

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Colorado’s company for advanced propulsion systems for space, hypersonics, and national security

Dan Jablonsky
CEO,
Monday, Dec. 2 | 4 P.M. | AERO N250

Please join Mark Sirangelo as he welcomes Dan Jablonsky, the CEO of Ursa Major for a discussion of his career, the company’s advanced propulsion systems and the future of space propulsion technology. 

Ursa Major is the leading independent rocket propulsion provider and a critical player in building the defense industrial base in the United States. As the first American company to fire an oxygen-rich staged combustion engine, Ursa Major provides reusable, high-performing propulsion systems to commercial space enterprises, defense contractors, and the Department of Defense for launch, hypersonics, and national security missions. The Company is headquartered in Berthoud, Colorado and has been named one of the best places to work by Built in Colorado three years in a row.

Jablonsky is highly experienced in leading and scaling companies and has held senior leadership roles in the aerospace and defense industry for more than a decade. Most recently, he served as President and CEO of space technology company Maxar Technologies and led that company through its successful take-private acquisition by Advent International. Previously, he held a variety of senior positions, including as President, at satellite imagery company DigitalGlobe. He started his career as a surface warfare officer and nuclear engineer in the US Navy before working as an attorney at corporate law firms, for the SEC, and in in-house roles.

Jablonsky holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, graduated from the Navy Nuclear Power School, and earned a JD from the University of Washington School of Law.

Mark N. Sirangelo created and hosts the CU Future Insight Seminar Series as CU’s Entrepreneur-Scholar in Residence. He is the recent Chairman of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Board and the DoD’s Space Advisory Committee.  Previously he was Special Assistant to the NASA Administrator helping to develop NASA’s return to the Moon.  Mark was the founding executive and head of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems and has served as the Chief Innovation Officer of Colorado.

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Javier Jiménez
Emeritus Research Professor, Fluid Mechanics, Polytechnic U. Madrid
Friday, Nov. 22 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 111

Abstract: Turbulence is a high-dimensional dynamical system with known equations of motion. It can be numerically integrated, but the simulation results are also high-dimensional and hard to interpret.  Lower-dimensional models are not dynamical systems, because some dynamics is discarded in the projection, and a stochastic Perron-Frobenius operator substitutes the equations of motion. Using as example turbulent flows at moderate but non-trivial Reynolds number, we show that particularly deterministic projections can be identified by either Monte-Carlo or exhaustive testing, and can be interpreted as coherent structures. We also show that they can be used to construct data-driven ‘fake’ models that retain many of the statistical characteristics of the real flow. 

Bio: Aeronautical Engineer by the Madrid School of Aeronautical, and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics by Caltech. Currently Emeritus research professor of Fluid Mechanics at the Polytechnic U. Madrid. Past positions include the Ec. Polytechnique, Palaiseau, Stanford University, NASA Ames Res. Centre, and the IBM Madrid Scientific Centre. He is member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. Elected fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics of London and of the European Mechanics Society (Euromech).  

He has received the research prize of the Spanish Academy of Sciences and the Fluid Mechanics prizes of both Euromech and the APS. He has coauthored over a hundred publications in international refereed journals, 10 books, 85 book chapters and invited conferences, 13 invited courses, 21 technical reports and numerous other publications, resulting in about 25000 citations. He has directed 19 doctoral theses.

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Todd Walter
Research Professor, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University 
Friday, Nov. 15 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 111

Abstract: GPS has evolved into a vital component of our critical infrastructure.  Originally developed over 50 years ago as a military navigation system, it has since been transformed into an indispensable utility, with over 9 billion civilian GPS receivers now in use worldwide. Despite its ubiquity, many are unaware of the extent to which GPS supports and enables modern life. GPS underpins our transportation networks, global communications, and financial transactions, enhancing productivity across a wide array of sectors, including power generation, agriculture, surveying, scientific research, and the oil, gas, and mining industries. The economic impact of losing GPS capabilities would be profound, with estimates suggesting that the United States alone would incur losses exceeding one billion dollars per day due to diminished efficiencies and service disruptions.

However, GPS is highly susceptible to interference. Its signals, transmitted at extremely low power, can be easily masked or overwhelmed by terrestrial sources of radio interference. In recent years, there has been a marked increase in GPS jamming incidents and, more troublingly, in spoofing attacks. Spoofing occurs when false GPS signals are transmitted, causing receivers to misinterpret their location or timing data. For critical applications reliant on accurate positioning and timing, spoofed signals pose serious risks, leading to potentially dangerous situations for users.

This talk will provide an overview of the GPS system, discuss its vulnerabilities, and explore protective measures designed to shield GPS users from these emerging risks.

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Olivier de Weck 
Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems, MIT
Friday, Nov. 1 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 111

Abstract: In this seminar I will discuss what I have learned from studying the evolution of technology over longer periods of time. This includes how to quantify technological progress correctly (generalized Moore's Law, S-Curves and Pareto fronts) and how to plan for its future improvement through technology roadmapping and focused R&D investment. 

Case studies presented will include civil aviation which connects humans and cargo across our planet, as well as the Deep Space Network (DSN) that is used to communicate with our interplanetary probes. I will conclude by speculating about the existence of a future technological singularity and what I see as the major challenges and opportunities for technology in general and aerospace in particular in the 21st century. 

This seminar is based on the recent book published by Springer Nature.

Bio: Olivier de Weck is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His main research is in Systems Engineering with a focus on how complex technological systems, such as satellites and launch vehicles, are designed and optimized and how they evolve over time. 

He is a Fellow of INCOSE and Fellow of AIAA and a former chair of its Space Logistics Technical Committee. He helped develop the first integrated model of the Next Generation Space Telescope (now JWST) and the concept of interplanetary supply chains together with colleagues at NASA and JPL. Prof. de Weck previously served as Senior Vice President of Technology Planning and Roadmapping at Airbus and he is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, as well as the Associate Department Head of MIT | Aero Astro. 

His passion is to improve life on our home planet Earth, while paving the way for humanity’s future off-world settlements.

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Keith Gremban
Research Professor, Smead Aerospace
Friday, Oct. 18 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 111

Abstract: When stationed abroad, U.S. military, diplomatic, and non-governmental personnel use 5G networks that may be operated by untrusted and potentially hostile actors. GHOST (5G Hidden Operations through Securing Traffic) enables secure operations over these networks by hiding sensitive movement and communications from adversaries. 

GHOST is a software application that can swap device IDs and activity patterns to prevent individuals from being identified, tracked and targeted; inject false network traffic to hide organizational activity; and enable deception operations to mislead adversaries. This presentation will provide an overview of the security challenges GHOST is designed to overcome, and the concepts, data analyses, and mathematics underlying the GHOST product.

Bio: Keith Gremban is a Research Professor in the Ann and H. J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department and Co-Director of the Spectrum Policy Initiative in the Silicon Flatirons Center, both at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

His research interests are in wireless communications, radio spectrum science and policy, and the Internet of Things.

Keith spent nearly 25 years in industry, was a Program Manager at the Department of Defense, and was the laboratory director for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. 

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Internet of Things Magazine. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his M.S. and B.S. in mathematics from Michigan State University.

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