Program Director

Program Director


Michael Ross is a Professor of Mechanical and Astronautical Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, CA.

 

Michael Ross is a Professor of Mechanical and Astronautical Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, CA.

He is the 14th recipient of the Carl E. and Jessie W. Menneken Award, the highest honor awarded by the Navy's University for Excellence in Scientific Research. His current research focus is on advancing the development of pseudospectral theory and techniques for the real-time computation of optimal controls for nonlinear and nonsmooth dynamical systems, including nonlinear feedback.  He is the co-developer of DIDO, the object-oriented software for rapid dynamic optimization. The software and its variants have been used extensively at The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (where he spent two years as a Visiting Associate Professor) to solve complex optimal control problems arising in astrodynamics, launch vehicle design and missile guidance. He is also the co-developer of ACAPS, a MATLAB code used at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the preliminary design of interplanetary aeroassisted maneuver. 

He has also been the Project Lead on PANSAT, a small experimental communications satellite built at NPS, currently in low-Earth-orbit. He has served on the AIAA Astrodynamics Technical Committee, the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award Committee and the AAS Spaceflight Mechanics Technical Committee. He is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a member of AAS, SIAM and Sigma Xi.