Home
QR Code

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 9, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Stephen Granade

"Sensors for On-Orbit Docking"

ABSTRACT -- Docking spacecraft autonomously while on orbit can provide many benefits, from uncrewed resupply of the ISS to robotic servicing of craft like the Hubble Space Telescope. However, autonomous docking has been limited by what sensors and sensor processing are available. We’ll discuss the tradeoffs in sensor design, such as whether the sensor should work with specialized cooperative targets or uncooperative spacecraft. We’ll also look at existing sensors such as the Russian Kurs system, NASA’s Advanced Video Guidance Sensor, and Neptec's TriDAR sensor.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Stephen Granade is a physicist who specializes in sensors for robotic vehicles. His current research involves sensors for Army Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. He has worked on sensors that can read your fingerprint from 10 feet away, systems that let unpiloted helicopters land automatically, and a video-based sensor that helped guide the Space Shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope. He also worked with NASA on the Advanced Video Guidance Sensor (AVGS), a laser-based sensor that flew on DARPA’s Orbital Express mission and NASA's DART mission.

His PhD research was on laser cooling and trapping neutral atoms to nearly absolute zero in order to create Fermionic superfluids and to study quantum mechanical effects on a macro scale. He has won awards for presentations to non-scientist audiences and has provided scientific commentary for FoxNews.com, CBS Marketwatch, and Jalopnik.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov