Jay McMahon
University of Colorado Boulder
Seminar Information
Recent asteroid missions such as OSIRIS-REx and DART have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in proximity operations, sample collection, and kinetic impact. These successes -- and the challenges encountered along the way -- motivate a new generation of missions with increasingly ambitious objectives, including ESA's Hera mission to the Didymos binary system and the UAESA EMA mission. Meeting these objectives will benefit from advances in autonomous guidance, navigation, and control, particularly for proximity operations around small, irregular bodies with poorly known environments. In this talk I will briefly discuss lessons learned from OSIRIS-REx and DART, then focus on current and future research from my lab addressing key challenges in autonomous asteroid proximity operations. Topics will include optical navigation for close-approach and flyby scenarios, autonomous hazard detection and trajectory correction, and real-time GNC for operations in uncertain gravitational environments. I will also discuss how autonomy enables entirely new mission concepts, including soft-robotic spacecraft that could expand what is possible at small bodies.
Jay McMahon is an Associate Professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences department at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on autonomy, guidance, navigation, and control for spacecraft, along with the governing dynamics for these systems. He has especially focused on applications to small bodies. He was a Participating Scientist for the DART Mission, and was on the science teams investigating gravity science for NASA's OSIRIS-REx and JAXA's Hayabusa2 missions. He was named the 2020 Outstanding Faculty Graduate Advisor Award in CU Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 2020 he was selected for a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and in 2018 he was selected as a NASA STMD Early Career Faculty fellow. He is also a NIAC fellow, and was the AIAA Rocky Mountain Section Young Engineer of the Year in 2017. He is also an Associate Fellow of the AIAA. He obtained his PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2011, his MS in 2006 from the University of Southern California, and his BS from the University of Michigan in 2004. He previously worked on launch vehicle guidance systems at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA. Asteroid (46829) McMahon - a main belt binary asteroid - is named in his honor.