August 8, 2013
Divya Thakur, an aerospace engineering PhD candidate, has won the John V. Breakwell Student Travel Award from the American Astronautical Society (AAS) Space Flight Mechanics Committee.
Thakur will receive a $1,000 award to offset the cost of attending and presenting her paper at the AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference at Hilton Head, S.C. The conference will be held Aug 11-15 and will recognize Thakur for her research in adaptive attitude-control.
Thakur will present her paper, “Adaptive Attitude-Tracking Control of Spacecraft with Uncertain Time-Varying Inertia Parameters,” to conference attendees, and will be recognized for receiving the travel award at a ceremony.
“I’m looking forward to presenting the paper because we have put so much hard work into it. I can’t wait to meet with people in the field and learn about what else in going on out there,” Thakur said.
The John V. Breakwell Student Travel Award was created to encourage research in space flight mechanics and astrodynamics. The AAS provides financial support to students presenting papers at each AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meetings and Astrodynamics Conferences, by covering the cost of lodging, travel and conference fees. To apply for the award Thakur had to submit her full paper, curriculum vitae, and a recommendation letter from her graduate advisor, Dr. Maruthi Akella.
Thakur worked in conjunction with Dr. Sukumar Srikant, an assistant professor in the Department of Systems and Control Engineering at IIT Bombay, and Professor Maruthi Akella. Thakur’s paper will address the problem of attitude control of a spacecraft that has unknown time varying system parameters.
“A lot of times the exact mass properties of a spacecraft can’t be determined during pre-flight testing. On top of that, the mass properties could be changing quite rapidly in-flight due to fuel depletion or mass displacement if the spacecraft has deployable parts.” `Thakur said. “So now not only is your knowledge of the system uncertain, it is also changing, and potentially very fast. You really have to take this into account to do precise attitude tracking. Our research is exploring how to do just that – we’re developing adaptive control algorithms that can cope with this uncertainty and perform accurate tracking.”
Thakur strives to have her work make some kind of general impact on the world, and hopes her research will help her do just that.
“We rely on satellites for a lot of things, whether it’s for science or communications, and a growing number of missions are demanding very high accuracy to control these satellites. I hope my work will help in that regard, in making complex mission objectives more feasible.”
Thakur, who will be graduating in May 2014, has a lot of plans for her future. Her immediate plans after graduation are to work in industry. Her time here at UT has also motivated her to eventually return to academia and become a professor.
“By going into industry I hope to be able to get a better perspective of how things are relevant to the real world and be able to teach one day from that perspective,” Thakur said. “Having an academic and an industry perspective will allow me to give a well-rounded education to future engineers when I become a professor.”
