3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Critical to the development of space missions is the careful analysis and design of the desired path of the space vehicle (mission design) and the determination of the space vehicle’s actual state vector (navigation). This course presents these two topics in an integrated manner, intended to provide space engineering professionals with a technical understanding of these complex subjects. Mission Design topics include kinematics, Kepler’s Laws, Newton’s Law of gravitation, modeling of several fidelity levels of spacecraft trajectory dynamics, and optimization of objective functions and satisfaction of constraints. Navigation topics include dynamics and measurement model formulations, standard estimation algorithms such as the Kalman filter and batch estimators, and performance analysis. This course will focus on the theory from a mathematical derivation perspective, example problems, and practical implementation considerations. This is an algorithm intensive course and students are expected to be comfortable with the following: MATLAB programming (or equivalent), Linear Algebra, Linear Systems, Differential Equations, basic Probability concepts, and Calculus.