5/5/2025 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Christopher D’Souza is one of about 100 navigation specialists in the world. Since 2023, he has served as the NASA Technical Fellow for Guidance, Navigation and Control. He is this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Alumni award from the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
D’Souza received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the U. of I. in ’83 and ’84 respectfully and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas. All his degrees are in aerospace engineering, with a focus on optimal control theory and optimal estimation theory.
His professional career began at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1985 as a maneuver analyst for the Magellan and Galileo missions. In 1991, he began working for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Eglin AFB developing trajectory optimization methods and advanced guidance laws for air-to-air and air-to-surface vehicles. He was the GNC lead for the first air-to-surface vehicle that used Differential GPS.
In 1996, D’Souza began working at the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge on guidance and navigation algorithms for rendezvous and capture and docking, primarily for the 2005 Mars Sample Return Mission. At the Johnson Space Center, he worked primarily on the Orion Guidance and Navigation system.
He joined the NASA/Johnson Space Center in 2005 and in 2009 began serving as the Deputy Branch Chief, of the GNC Autonomous Flight Systems Branch where he led a group of 22 engineers responsible for the onboard Guidance, Navigation and Targeting of crewed vehicles. In 2014, he was selected to be the Navigation Technical Discipline Lead for Human Spaceflight.
D’Souza is the principal architect of the Orion onboard navigation system consisting of four separate navigation filters, all of which flew successfully on Artemis I. He was the lead developer of the linear covariance toolset, or LinCov, which has been used extensively in the design of the Artemis missions as well as on other missions. He has developed guidance laws for planetary landing, rendezvous and intercept. His optimal landing guidance law was used on the successful Firefly Blue Ghost landing. He has over 100 conference and journal publications.
D'Souza has served on numerous AIAA and AAS committees and has been Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics since 2014. He was named an AAS Fellow in 2019 and an AIAA Fellow in 2023. He received the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award in 2020 and the AAS Dirk Brouwer Award in 2022. In addition to these, he has received numerous NASA awards for the Artemis I mission.
For more about his career journey, visit https://aerospace.illinois.edu/news/lifes-detours-led-ae-alum-head-orion-navigation.