AE Seminar
"From Orbits to Craters: Algebraic Methods in Image Analysis for Aerospace"
featuring
Michela Mancini
Monday, July 1
10:00 - 11:00 a.m.
Virtual Link TBD
About the Seminar:
Images are one of the richest sources of information available to airborne and spaceborne platforms, supporting tasks that range from environmental monitoring to spacecraft navigation and planetary surface exploration. When a camera captures an image, the three-dimensional world is projected onto a two-dimensional plane, and the properties preserved during this projection often encode valuable information about the sensed scene and the imaging platform itself. This makes tools from algebraic and projective geometry a natural and effective framework for image analysis in aerospace, since many features of interest – orbits, celestial bodies, and surface terrain features – often admit compact and well-structured geometric representations whose properties survive projection and can be exploited directly.
In this seminar, we will follow that idea across two different settings. We will first see how angles-only and stellar aberration measurements can be tied to simple geometric constructions, enabling Initial Orbit Determination without the need for an initial guess. We will then turn to image analysis of planetary terrain, focusing on linear pushbroom cameras, a class of sensors that produces high-resolution imagery from orbital and aerial platforms. We will derive the analytical description of a conic section imaged with a pushbroom camera and show how this result enables crater-based terrain reconstruction and camera positioning. Throughout the talk, we will also discuss general-purpose results in conic geometry that recur throughout these problems.
About the Speaker:
Michela Mancini holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech and from Sapienza University of Rome. Her research applies tools from algebraic and projective geometry to estimation and image analysis problems in aerospace, including initial orbit determination, source localization, and terrain reconstruction. Her work has been published in journals including The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, NAVIGATION, and The Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. Currently, she works as an Astrodynamics Specialist at Vyoma GmbH, where she focuses on problems related to space situational awareness.