Speaker: Grace Gao, Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford

Abstract:

We are entering a new era of Moon exploration. After more than fifty years since the Apollo program, NASA's Artemis mission will land humans on the Moon again. In addition, there are more than a hundred missions planned within the next decade by various space agencies and companies.

In this talk, I will present our recent research effort on a "Moon-GPS," a lunar satellite navigation system with smaller and lower-cost satellites than the Earth-GPS satellites. We are also building a neural twin of the Moon surface using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). Our work provides tools for NASA’s Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project to send a swam of small rovers to the moon surface and the Endurance Mission concept for a long-range traverse and sample return rover to drive about 2000km autonomously in the lunar South Pole–Aitken basin.

Bio:

Grace X. Gao is an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. She leads the Navigation and Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory (NAV Lab). Prof. Gao has won a number of awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Institute of Navigation Early Achievement Award and the RTCA William E. Jackson Award. Prof. Gao also won various teaching and advising awards, including AIAA Stanford Chapter Excellence in Advising Award and Excellence in Teaching Award in 2022 and 2023, respectively. https://navlab.stanford.edu