Vishala Arya
Postdoctoral Scholar, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Wednesday, Mar. 20 | 9:30 a.m. | AERO 111
Abstract: Space missions have always been exciting with rapid innovations and developments to advance science and our engineering capability to match our growing aspirations. With the advent of electric propulsion technology arose the need to accommodate the complex coupling between various space subsystems into the optimization construct for designing realistic and more efficient trajectories.
This work describes novel extensions of classical indirect methods to optimize systems involving inequality constraints and discontinuities in states, controls and abrupt time triggered events. Furthermore, innovative methods are introduced that enable multiple preliminary trade-offs among mission objectives, propulsion constraints, solar power sub-systems and parameters, trajectory design and operational constraints. These challenges are handled by performing a spacecraft system level optimization for the nominal mission design resulting in an indirect multi-disciplinary optimization (MDO) family of methods for missions.
The approach is a fusion of invariant embedding, and mixed integer nonlinear programming with calculus of variation that significantly expands the current class of trajectory optimization problems solvable by classical methods. The work also introduces an original stochastic, covariance constrained guidance approach for strategizing tracking, re-planning and associated contingencies for space missions.
This new concept is potentially an initiating step towards an autonomous guidance approach that enables cooperative autonomy, reliability and precision of future missions. The presented methods yield breakthrough recipes for system-level optimization that involve discrete operational constraints/events and even probabilistic constraints. The optimization approach while demonstrated on aerospace dynamical systems has a wide applicability.
Bio: Vishala Arya is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the mission design and navigation section at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is working on missions like Europa Clipper and GRACE-FO. She holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Texas A & M University with Dr. John Junkins as her advisor.
Earlier, she completed her M.S. in robotics as part of a HEEP Graduate fellowship under Dr. Robert Skelton. Her research interests include mission design with multidisciplinary design optimization of spacecraft, trajectory, and propulsion parameters of different propulsion systems, autonomous and fault-tolerant guidance of spacecrafts, robust system optimization and stochastic control principles for non-linear systems.
She is a DAAD scholar and a recipient of John V Breakwell award at AAS Space Flight Mechanics conference and best paper award at AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control conference.