Carlo Novara Editor

Enrico Canuto has designed the drag-free control of the successful European GOCE spacecraft. Recently he has studied and proved the integrated formation, drag-free and attitude control of the European Next Generation Gravity Mission. He also contributed to conception, design and implementation of on-ground test facilities for space qualification, among them the thrust stand Nanobalance. He has published several journal papers on the spacecraft control, based on the Embedded Model Methodology, which developed and applied to several applications. He has taught a course on Aerospace modelling and control at Politecnico di Torino. Carlo Novara is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Torino. He was a visiting researcher at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and 2004. He is the author or co-author of about 100 scientific publications in international journals and conference proceedings. He has been involved in several national and international projects and in several research contracts in collaboration with Italian and European companies. He has worked for more than 15 years in the fields of nonlinear system identification and control and, recently, he is bringing his experience in these fields to the aerospace sector. His current research interests include satellite attitude, drag free and formation control. He is teaching a course on Aerospace modelling and control at Politecnico di Torino. Donato Carlucci is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Torino. He is the author or co-author of scientific publications on applied nonlinear systems control. He has been involved in national and international projects in collaboration with Italian and European industries. He has worked for more than 40 years in the fields of nonlinear system control including aerospace systems. His current research interests include satellite attitude control. He is teaching courses on Automation and Production Systems at Politecnico di Torino Carlos Norberto Perez Montenegro is postdoctoral research assistant at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. His research interests include automatic control algorithms on different platforms, use of programming environments for microcontrollers, programmable logic controllers (PLC), inter alia. Luca Massotti received the Laurea degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino (Turin, I), in 2000, and the Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the Aeronautical and Space Department of the Politecnico di Torino (Turin, I), in 2004. In 2001-2002, he was visiting researcher at West Virginia University (WVU, US) to study aircraft modelling and Neural Network controllers. After the Ph.D. degree, in 2004 he joined Thales Alenia Space in Turin (I) as an engineering consultant for metrology and AOCS. From 2005 to 2007 he was a Post Doctoral Researcher at the Earth Observation Programmes Department of the European Space Agency (ESA) at ESTEC facility, in The Netherlands. He is currently a consultant at ESA/ESTEC, Earth Observation Programmes Directorate – Future Missions division, with Rhea B.V. since 2007. He is the author of co-author of more than 80 scientific publications in international journals, conference proceedings and articles on books. He has been working on European projects of Earth Explorers satellites (in particular on Biomass, selected as Earth Explorer 7, and FLEX, selected as Earth Explorer 8), GEO High Resolution and GOCE follow-on missions. He is actively involved in the ESA Technology Research Programme, either in the preparation or the review phases, in the domain of micro-propulsion, laser metrology and AOCS. He has been appointed as coordinator of the Inter-Agency Working Group between ESA and NASA on gravity topics, and he is actively involved with the Center for Gravitational Experiments in Wuhan (China). His research interests cover aircraft & satellite modelling and simulation, nonlinear and adaptive control design, artificial intelligence techniques (NNs), Nano-balancing, AOCS, Drag Free and Attitude Control for scientific satellites. Dr. Massotti is a Member of the AIAA GNC Technical Committee, Senior AIAA Member, and lecturer at several universities and research centers (e.g. Giessen University (D), Politecnico di Torino (I), FOTEC (A) and HUST University (China)).