In my current role at Advanced Space, I work on maturing space navigation technologies and developing missions for Earth orbit, cislunar, and deep space regimes. Space navigation is the art and science of understanding *where* a spacecraft currently is, where it is going, and how change its trajectory to go where you want it to go in the future. A related problem is spacecraft tracking, where we often use many of the same methods to understand and estimate the motion of non-cooperative space objects such as debris or adversarial spacecraft. My job is to understand the mathematics and real-world conditions, develop new approaches for solving these problems, and apply them to real missions and products.
I am also broadly interested in aerospace education, particularly in Utah, so I developed an orbital mechanics course for the University of Utah and was given the opportunity to teach it for the first time in spring of 2025. Additionally, I am the president of the University of Utah Mechanical Engineering Alumni Society and an active member of the Utah Section of AIAA.

Precision space navigation has classically been done through the use of large radio antennas on the Earth, such as the Deep Space Network. These send signals to the spacecraft and the spacecraft sends them back, and the time it takes can be converted to distance using the speed of light. They can also measure a Doppler shift that is related to the relative velocity of the spacecraft from the ground station. Using very precise force, measurement, time, and reference frame models, very precise measurements can be made and turned into data for orbit estimation.
This has several limitations. If the spacecraft is not cooperative, RADAR could be used. This requires much more power because the signal has to bounce off and return on its own. Another limitation is that there are only so many ground stations and keeping up with the increasing number of satellites can be very challenging to this infrastructure. Telescopes can be used to generate angle measurements, but even these are limited to nighttime operations and it can be difficult to detect small objects.
GPS, which is a revolutionary technology that is dependent on classical satellite navigation, can also be used in orbit for user satellites, but these signals can be jammed in a wartime environment and they can’t be used effectively beyond Earth orbit for several reasons.
In rendezvous and docking scenarios, where there are two or more spacecraft flying nearby, the situation is different. Cameras and LIDAR sensors are commonly used for pose estimation, but the use of cameras for this can be complex without known reference points (fiducials) to track visually. LIDARs are great because they, like RADAR, provide range measurements directly, but they also come with size, weight, and power limitations.

I am involved with several efforts related to these problems.
On the general spacecraft navigation side, I am working on developing methods of onboard optical navigation. This is the idea of using planets, terrain, and other spacecraft as sources of measurement information for an onboard navigation system. The idea is not new but better methods of doing it using digital cameras, digital elevation models, and new computing techniques are a hot topic of research. Currently, I am evaluating the efficacy of one such algorithm for SpaceX’s Starship HLS mission to the Moon, for example.
I am also the Principal Investigator for two SBIR grants, one under NASA JPL and one under AFRL. On the first one, we are developing a new technique for doing relative navigation in rendezvous and docking scenarios using a monocular camera. This technology will be capable of real-time relative position and attitude estimation, mass property estimation, and also shape and material reconstruction of an unprepared or uncooperative space object. On the second SBIR, we are developing new uncertainty propagation and data fusion techniques for tracking uncooperative space objects. We are currently applying this to commercial data provided by the US Space Command’s Joint Commercial Operations (JCO) cell on the Artemis II mission as a test of these capabilities.
I have also worked on studies that investigate the possibility of building a “Lunar GPS” constellation, which would enable much better landing and surface operations in the future.

My company’s ethos is to “Enable the sustainable exploration, development, and settlement of space” and we are an industry leader in lunar space operations, mission design, and technology development. Navigation technologies are absolutely key in making this future possible, especially considering future spacecraft will need to be autonomous and use optical navigation techniques to be successful.