Astronautics is the practice of sending spacecraft beyond Earth's atmosphere into outer space. Spaceflight is one of its main applications and space science is its overarching field.
Richard Ernest Bellman was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founded the leading biomathematical journal Mathematical Biosciences, as well as the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.
Dynamical systems theory is an area of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex dynamical systems, usually by employing differential equations or difference equations. When differential equations are employed, the theory is called continuous dynamical systems. From a physical point of view, continuous dynamical systems is a generalization of classical mechanics, a generalization where the equations of motion are postulated directly and are not constrained to be Euler–Lagrange equations of a least action principle. When difference equations are employed, the theory is called discrete dynamical systems. When the time variable runs over a set that is discrete over some intervals and continuous over other intervals or is any arbitrary time-set such as a Cantor set, one gets dynamic equations on time scales. Some situations may also be modeled by mixed operators, such as differential-difference equations.
Terence Chi-Shen Tao is an Australian mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory.
Space launch is the earliest part of a flight that reaches space. Space launch involves liftoff, when a rocket or other space launch vehicle leaves the ground, floating ship or midair aircraft at the start of a flight. Liftoff is of two main types: rocket launch, and non-rocket spacelaunch.
Harry Julian Allen, also known as Harvey Allen, was an aeronautical engineer and a Director of the NASA Ames Research Center, most noted for his "Blunt Body" theory of atmospheric entry which permitted successful recovery of orbiting spacecraft. His technique is still used to this day.
DIDO is a MATLAB optimal control toolbox for solving general-purpose optimal control problems. It is widely used in academia, industry, and NASA. Hailed as a breakthrough software, DIDO is based on the pseudospectral optimal control theory of Ross and Fahroo. The latest enhancements to DIDO are described in Ross.
Moshe Zakai was a Distinguished Professor at the Technion, Israel in electrical engineering, member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Rothschild Prize winner.
Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is similar, but deals with the electronics side of aerospace engineering.
Kathleen Connor Howell is an American aerospace engineer known for her contributions to dynamical systems theory applied to spacecraft trajectory design which led to the use of halo orbit in multiple NASA space missions. She is currently the Hsu Lo Distinguished Professor at Purdue University in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In acknowledgment of her many achievements, Discover magazine recognized her in 2002 as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Value-driven design (VDD) is a systems engineering strategy based on microeconomics which enables multidisciplinary design optimization. Value-driven design is being developed by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, through a program committee of government, industry and academic representatives. In parallel, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has promulgated an identical strategy, calling it value-centric design, on the F6 Program. At this point, the terms value-driven design and value-centric design are interchangeable. The essence of these strategies is that design choices are made to maximize system value rather than to meet performance requirements.
The IEEE Judith A. Resnik Award is a technical field award presented by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to either an individual, or a team, "for outstanding contributions to space engineering within the fields of interest of the IEEE".
Dragoslav D. Šiljak is professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara University, where he held the title of Benjamin and Mae Swig University Professor. He is best known for developing the mathematical theory and methods for control of complex dynamic systems characterized by large-scale, information structure constraints and uncertainty.
John L. Junkins is an American academic and a distinguished professor of aerospace engineering in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University specializing in spacecraft navigation, guidance, dynamics, and control. He holds the Royce E. Wisenbaker Endowed Chair at Texas A&M University and also serves as the Founding Director of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University, since its founding in December 2010. On November 24, 2020, Junkins was announced as the interim President of Texas A&M University starting January 2021. He was the interim president until May 31, 2021.
Isaac Michael Ross is a Distinguished Professor and Program Director of Control and Optimization at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He has published a highly-regarded textbook on optimal control theory and seminal papers in pseudospectral optimal control theory, energy-sink theory, the optimization and deflection of near-Earth asteroids and comets, robotics, attitude dynamics and control, orbital mechanics, real-time optimal control, unscented optimal control and continuous optimization. The Kang–Ross–Gong theorem, Ross' π lemma, Ross' time constant, the Ross–Fahroo lemma, and the Ross–Fahroo pseudospectral method are all named after him. According to a report published by Stanford University, Ross is one of the world's top 2% of scientists.
Mike Gruntman is a Russian-American physicist, space engineer, and author. He is professor of astronautics and aerospace engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California (USC).
Moriba Kemessia Jah CorrFRSE is an American space scientist and aerospace engineer who describes himself as a "space environmentalist", specializing in orbit determination and prediction, especially as related to space situational awareness and space traffic monitoring. He is currently an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. Jah previously worked as a spacecraft navigator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was a navigator for the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Exploration Rover, and his last mission was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety and, the Royal Astronomical Society. Jah was also selected into the 10th anniversary class of TED Fellows and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022. He also was selected into the AIAA class of Fellows and Honorary Fellows in the year of the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11. The AIAA "confers the distinction of Fellow upon individuals in recognition of their notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sciences or technology of aeronautics and astronautics."
Maruthi Ram Akella is an Indian-American aerospace engineer. Akella specializes in the control of complex dynamical systems that are subject to large scale nonlinearities and uncertainties.
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are a type of universal function approximators that can embed the knowledge of any physical laws that govern a given data-set in the learning process, and can be described by partial differential equations (PDEs). They overcome the low data availability of some biological and engineering systems that makes most state-of-the-art machine learning techniques lack robustness, rendering them ineffective in these scenarios. The prior knowledge of general physical laws acts in the training of neural networks (NNs) as a regularization agent that limits the space of admissible solutions, increasing the correctness of the function approximation. This way, embedding this prior information into a neural network results in enhancing the information content of the available data, facilitating the learning algorithm to capture the right solution and to generalize well even with a low amount of training examples.
Gui Haichao is a Chinese aerospace engineer, researcher and professor selected as part of the Shenzhou program.
