He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in 2002 from Purdue University. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Purdue University before joining NASA Jet Propul- sion Laboratory (JPL) in 2003. He was a senior technologist at JPL and a lecturer in GALCIT at Caltech. At JPL, Dr. Acikmese developed GN&C algorithms for planetary landing, formation flying spacecraft, and asteroid and comet sample return missions. He was the developer of the “fly-away” GN&C algorithms in Mars Science Laboratory, which successfully landed on Mars in August 2012. His convex optimization based planetary landing algorithm is currently being flight-tested for future Mars missions.Hosted by