Purdue alumna Ashwati Das was selected to the “20 Under 35” list by the Space & Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) of outstanding young space and satellite professionals under the age of 35.

Ashwati Das (MSAAE '14, PhD AAE '18) 

Das (MSAAE ’14, PhD AAE ’18) and the rest of the honorees will be celebrated at the Future Leaders Dinner October 8 in Mountain View, Calif. They were selected from nominations submitted by membership as 20 employees and entrepreneurs to “keep your eye on in the coming years,” according to SSPI.

“There is justifiable concern in our industry about our ability to attract and retain talented and ambitious young people, at a time when we compete for employees with the best-known names in technology,” executive director Robert Bell said in a press release. “The 20 Under 35 list is a chance to recognize the power of our mission to inspire the next generation to join us. That mission is about doing business, of course, but also about making the world more prosperous, better informed, safer and stronger. These 20 people are on their way to remarkable achievement that we hope to honor some day with membership in the Space & Satellite Hall of Fame.”

Das is a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She works on fault detection and recovery for the Europa Clipper mission, aiming to help develop a sound system architecture for successful operations, the SSPI release said. She was an intern at JPL before graduating from Purdue, and she delivered trade space analyses related to the Mars Sample Return and Europa Lander mission concepts.

While at Purdue, Das was a graduate student of Professor Kathleen Howell and her Multi-Body Dynamics Research Group. Das completed her Ph.D. in AAE with a dissertation on fusing the exploration of complex astrodynamical regimes with machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches. While with Howell's group, Das conducted research on the application of machine learning techniques to the design of transfer trajectories and recovery operations in the Earth-Moon system. During the course of her graduate career, she also provided trajectory analysis for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Orbital ATK, the SSPI release said.