Dr. Russell Carpenter – NESC Academy Biography
Russell Carpenter is a navigator at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he has worked in the guidance, navigation, and control area since July of 1998. He is currently the lead navigator for the Magnetospheric Multi-Scale (MMS), due to launch in March 2015, which depends on tightly controlled formation flying among four spinning satellites in highly elliptical orbits. While at Goddard, Russell has led the development of the GEONS multi-sensor onboard navigation software, which has been widely used within and outside the Agency, and enabled the first public demonstration of satellite formation flight in 2000, between EO-1 and Landsat-7. Russell also initiated, led for several years, and continues to contribute to the Orbit Determination Toolbox project, which provides open-source software for navigation analysis. From 2006 to 2007, Russell was a member of DARPA’s Orbital Express (OE) Independent Readiness Review Team, and led a review of the readiness of OE’s rendezvous system to return to unmated operations after an on-orbit navigation failure. In 2005, Russell was the Deputy Chairman of the Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology (DART) Mishap Investigation Board, where he led the trajectory reconstruction effort.
Before coming to NASA Goddard, Russell was at NASA Johnson Space Center from 1987 to 1998, where he worked on Shuttle and Station navigation software, and performed research leading to orbital flight test of advanced space flight navigation techniques, including the first publicly documented use of GPS for rendezvous navigation, on STS-69. From 1996 to 1998, Russell was the Principal Investigator for a planned Mars Precision Landing Demonstration that was to have flown on the 2001 Mars Surveyor mission, which though cancelled, helped to pave the way for the technology that was used to successfully land Curiosity on Mars in 2012.
He has received the NASA Exceptional Service and Exceptional Achievement medals, and was the AIAA National Capital Section’s Young Scientist/Engineer of the Year in 2000. Russell has over 60 publications, and received the Best Paper award at the 2011 Astrodynamics Specialists Conference. He is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA, and an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Astronautical Sciences.
Russell attended The University of Texas at Austin, receiving a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in 1996.
When he is not navigating spacecraft, Russell navigates sailboats and small aircraft, including an experimental aircraft he built with two partners.