After graduating with my BS in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue in May 2016, I entered grad school as a member of Professor Jim Longuski’s Advanced Astrodynamics Concepts research group at Purdue. I completed my non-thesis MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics in May 2017, and finally I graduated with my PhD in May 2022. You can find my dissertation here, and the GitHub repository for much of the code that I developed here (I didn’t set the code up to be particularly usable for anyone else, but it’s there for reference).

The main focus of my graduate studies was to investigate how machine learning techniques could compare to existing numerical optimization techniques for spacecraft trajectory design.

Ultimately, I found using a neural network could provide high quality initial guesses for a numerical optimizer to quickly find the best solution, but I would be cautious trying to use a neural network without additional oversight and error checking.