Jack Ridderhof

Congratulations go out to AE doctoral student Jack Ridderhof for receiving AIAA’s Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Best Student Paper Award during at the 2019 SciTech conference held in San Diego, January 7-11.

The award is given annually by the AIAA GNC Technical Committee for a paper written by a student as a first author. In addition to the award and recognition, recipients receive $1,000 prize.

Ridderhof is the first author of “Minimum-Fuel Powered Descent in the Presence of Random Disturbances” a paper that explores some of the research he’s conducted with his advisor, Prof. Panagiotis Tsiotras.

“Imagine trying to plan a road trip through a region where you don’t have good maps. This paper was on the problem of steering a spacecraft to a pinpoint landing on Mars by using rocket engines, all while there are random disturbances acting on the spacecraft. Hopefully the ideas presented in the paper can be used to improve landing performance in future Mars missions," said Ridderhof, a native of Duluth, GA.

“We are interested in incorporating structured uncertainty into guidance and control design for Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) applications. The goal is that, by explicitly considering uncertainty, we can design guidance systems that can perform better in an uncertain environment.”

Ridderhof previously published another paper with Tsiotras, “Uncertainty Quantification and Control During Mars Powered Descent and Landing using Covariance Steering,” and was the recipient of a 2017 NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. He hopes to defend in 2022.