Robyn Woollands, aerospace engineering faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is one of just 48 scientists and engineers in the USA, and the only one in The Grainger College of Engineering this year, to receive a prestigious Young Investigator Program award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
AFOSR is the basic research arm of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Individuals selected for a YIP award must have received a Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last seven years and show exceptional ability and promise to conduct research relevant to the Air Force.
Woollands’ project involves novel mathematical and numerical advances for long-time evolution of space dynamics between the Earth and moon. The method will enable precise long duration propagation of spacecraft trajectories through chaotic regions between Earth and moon, utilizing high-fidelity dynamical models.
“The adaptive Picard-Chebyshev mathematical methods we will develop during this research effort will allow for accurate and efficient prediction of spacecraft positions between the Earth and moon decades into the future,” Woollands said.
Woollands has published 15 relevant peer-reviewed papers on Picard-Chebyshev propagation and five relevant peer-reviewed papers on optimal low-thrust trajectories. This new work brings together these two areas of her expertise.
“One of the challenges of space operations in cislunar space is that the volume of space is two to three orders of magnitude larger that than of the lower Earth orbit,” Woollands said. “Data association, such as corelating observations with known and unknown objects, will become increasingly more challenging as the number of objects in space rises.”
Woollands said, accurate and efficient trajectory propagation is the backbone of efficient data association algorithms which is critical to national defense.
In January 2021, after four years working as a mission design engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she was part of the navigation team for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Woollands joined the UIUC faculty.
Woollands has authored 23 peer-reviewed journal papers, 45 conference papers, and her work has been cited 564 times. She has published in high-impact journals such as the Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, the Journal of Astronautical Sciences, Acta Astronautica, the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Computer Modelling in Engineering Sciences.