Dr. Francesco Topputo has been at Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy) for over 17 years, starting out as a PhD student, then a postdoctoral fellow, then assistant professor, and now associate professor. He is also a visiting professor at TU Delft (Delft, the Netherlands). His PhD thesis was titled Low-thrust non-keplerian orbits: analysis, design, and control, where his studies focused on analysis and design of highly non-linear orbits arising from n-body dynamics.
Dr. Francesco Topputo has been at Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy) for over 17 years, starting out as a PhD student, then a postdoctoral fellow, then assistant professor, and now associate professor. He is also a visiting professor at TU Delft (Delft, the Netherlands). His PhD thesis was titled Low-thrust non-keplerian orbits: analysis, design, and control, where his studies focused on analysis and design of highly non-linear orbits arising from n-body dynamics.
I met him back in summer of 2019 when I was doing an internship at GOMSpace Luxembourg. GOMSpace is a company that is headquartered in Aalborg, Denmark and they have offices in Sweden and Luxembourg. We were working on the Miniaturized Asteroid Remote Geophysical Observer (abbreviated M-ARGO), which is a mission for a 12U CubeSat to use a low-thrust engine to reach and investigate an asteroid. Francesco led the effort of designing trajectories to thousands of asteroids so we could find a few feasible candidates for targets of this mission.
He is also the Principal Investigator for the Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (abbreviated LUMIO) mission which is for another 12U CubeSat to observe the Moon from a Earth-Moon L2 halo orbit for meteoroid impacts.
He’s also working on Hera’s Milani CubeSat, which is one of two 6U CubeSats that will be riding along Hera. Hera is part of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA), which is a joint mission with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that will be impacting a binary asteroid system called Didymos to test this method of asteroid redirection.
He also did modeling and simulation of solar arrays for the Rosetta / Philae mission, which was the first mission to orbit and land on a comet.
Links to the Space Engineering Podcast (YouTube, Spotify, Google Podcasts, SimpleCast): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOIRBaljOV8gYALpxUJywrHZuvZ9NFpz0 https://open.spotify.com/show/01GcglyOT2bw4moswvDg4O https://space-engineering-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9TelZzS3lDTQ?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwjggN2CxZTuAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQDg