PhD project of Dave Lloyd joint with ESA and SSC on stochastic space trajectory design funded

The project “Stochastic continuation for space trajectory design in uncertain environments“, joint between Nicola Baresi at the Surrey Space Centre and Dave Lloyd, has been funded, along with co-funding from the European Space Agency. The project supports a PhD student to start in October 2022. The project aims at implementing and developing novel stochastic continuation procedures that have the potential to revolutionize the trajectory design process by accounting for uncertainties from the very beginning of the satellite design phase. The idea is to study ‘moment maps’ of spacecraft distributions, i.e., maps of low-order moments of the satellite’s evolving density function using methods of numerical continuation, differential algebra and probabilistic programming. The numerical procedures will be general by nature and therefore applicable to a variety of spacecraft missions. The image below shows an example of a satellite trajectory.