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What the Painful Example of Stardust Teaches Us about Nav-ACS System Engineering
April 1, 2024 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Tim McElrath
Chief Engineer for JPL’s Mission Design and Navigation Section
Tim McElrath has worked at JPL for 39 and a half years, doing navigation on missions including: VEGA 1 and 2, Giotto, Phobos 2, MUSES-A, LAGEOS 2, Ulysses, Galileo, Deep Space 1, Stardust, Mars Odyssey, Mars Exploration Rovers, Deep Impact, Phoenix, Mars 2020, DART, and Psyche. He also led the mission design work on Europa Lander and several other proposed missions. Tim is currently the Chief Engineer for JPL’s Mission Design and Navigation Section. He enjoys coming up with fanciful titles for his papers and giving talks to (relative) youngsters about missions he been a part of.
Stardust was successful, so why would I call it painful? It’s because we had to completely re-invent Stardust’s Earth return, AFTER launch! Against the backdrop of the new Earth-return plan, we will explore the unfortunate interaction of navigation and attitude control for Stardust, and from it draw systems engineering lessons for the future. Some of those lessons will be told with fairytale imagery (including trolls), as befits a mission with a name like Stardust.
Location: Blocker 220
For Zoom Link, please register here!