December 5, 2022: J. Russell Carpenter, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 4:00 pm in 100 McBryde Hall, "Navigation Filter Best Practices"
- 4:00 p.m.
- 100 McBryde Hall
- J. Russell Carpenter, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- Faculty Host: Dr. Mark Psiaki
Abstract: As the era of commercial spaceflight begins, NASA must ensure that lessons the US has learned over the first 50 years of the Space Age will continue to positively influence the continuing exploration and development of space. Of the many successful strands of this legacy, onboard navigation stands out as an early triumph of technology whose continuous development and improvement remains as important to future exploration and commercial development as it was in the era of Gemini and Apollo. The key that opened the door to practical and reliable onboard navigation was the discovery and development of the extended Kalman filter (EKF) in the 1960s, a story that has been well-chronicled, and Kalman filtering has far outgrown NASA’s applications over the intervening decades. What are less well-documented are the accumulated art and lore, tips and tricks, and other institutional knowledge that NASA navigators have employed to design and operate EKFs in support of dozens of missions in the Gemini/Apollo era, well over one hundred Space Shuttle missions, and numerous robotic missions, without a failure ever attributed to an EKF. To document the best of these practices is the purpose that motivates the contributors to NASA/TP–2018–219822 “Navigation Filter Best Practices,” now publicly available from https://ntrs.nasa.gov.
Bio: Dr. J. Russell Carpenter has been with NASA since 1987, spending most of his career focused on development of onboard navigation systems, as a Navigator at the Johnson Space Center and the Goddard Space Flight Center. He currently serves as the Deputy Project Manager/Technical for Space Science Mission Operations (SSMO) at Goddard. SSMO is responsible for 20 missions and 27 spacecraft operating throughout the solar system. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), and a Professional Member of the Institute of Navigation. He has served on the AIAA GNC Technical Committee, and on the AAS Space Flight Mechanics Technical Committee. He is a past Associate Editor of the AAS Journal of the Astronautical Sciences. He has received the NASA Exceptional Service and Exceptional Achievement Medals and was the AIAA National Capital Section’s Young Scientist/Engineer of the Year in 2000. Russell has over 100 publications, including papers that received the Best Paper award at the 2011 Astrodynamics Specialists Conference, and the Institute of Navigation’s Burka award for Best Paper in the journal NAVIGATION in 2017. Main belt asteroid 12248 Russellcarpenter (formerly 1988 RX12) is named in his honor, for contributions to the Lucy and OSIRIS-REx missions. He attended The University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in 1989, with Highest Honors, and was a member of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Gamma Tau. During 1991-1993, he returned to U.T. Austin on a NASA Fellowship, receiving a M.S. in Aerospace Engineering in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in 1996.