An AAE alumnus was selected as one of the “20 Under 35” by Space & Satellite Professionals International (SSPI).

Jeffrey Stuart

Jeffrey Stuart (BSAAE ’08, MSAAE ’11, PhD AAE ’14) was among 20 employees and entrepreneurs to keep an eye on as “they represent, quite simply, the best of us in the years ahead,” SSPI’s website said. The third cohort was chosen from nominations submitted by the membership and evaluated by a panel of judges that also selects the “Promise Award,” given to the three top-ranked members of the 20 Under 35 group. 

Stuart joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory after completing his Ph.D., and he has taken on the position of Mission Design and Navigation lead for NASA’s upcoming heliophysics SmallSat formation mission, SunRISE, the SSPI site said. The aim of the mission is to characterize the formation and evolution of coronal mass ejections in order to better understand and predict hazardous space weather events. Stuart delivered critical mission designs, reference trajectories, orbit determination schemes and deployment and station-keeping strategies for the mission early on, which helped JPL win the mission proposal and led to him being named lead, the site said.

Stuart also serves as lead navigation and orbit determination analyst for the CubeSat mission NEA Scout. He will be leading the development of navigation efforts for highly complex operations of a non-traditional, propellant-less SmallSat mission to a near-Earth asteroid. He also has partnered with JPL’s Human-Computer Interfaces Group and Operations Lab to develop and introduce novel visualization schemes, including virtual reality and augmented reality, to mission design and navigation at JPL.

The Promise Award winners will be recognized at the 15th annual SSPI Future Leaders Celebration on Oct. 6. The event will be held virtually in conjunction with the virtual Satellite Innovation 2020 conference.