Alex Pascarella, a second-year Ph.D. student from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was awarded second prize in the Student Best Paper Competition at the 44th Annual American Astronautical Society’s Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference held this month in Breckenridge, Colorado.
Pascarella’s paper, titled, “Low Thrust Trajectory Optimization for the Solar System Pony Express,” was written with his adviser Assistant Professor Robyn Woollands at UIUC and with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory collaborators Etienne Pellegrini, Marc Sanchez-Net, and Joshua Vander Hook.
The paper was selected by a committee composed of academic and industry experts in the field of aerospace engineering. Woollands said, “I am so proud of Alex. He is very deserving of this honor and recognition.”
The award comes with a cash prize and a one-year MathWorks license.
The work was funded by a Phase I NASA Innovative Advanced Concept titled the Solar System Pony Express. Pascarella began the work with Woollands’ former colleagues at JPL, during his summer internship in 2021, and continued the work at UIUC during Fall 2021.