Graduate student in aerospace engineering wins Breakwell Student Paper Award

Keziban Saloglu, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering, was recently awarded the 2023 Breakwell Student Paper Award, a prestigious student prize in astrodynamics. Saloglu, now in her second year at Auburn, was presented the award at the Space Flight Mechanics Meeting Jan. 15-19 in Austin, Texas, hosted by the American Astronautical Society and cohosted by American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or AIAA. 

Saloglu’s award-winning paper, “Existence of Infinitely Many Optimal Equal-∆v (Delta-V) Trajectories in Two-Body Dynamics,” shares a breakthrough method for spacecraft impulsive trajectory optimization.

 “In the award-winning paper, we further investigated the intriguing features of those optimal solutions," said Saloglu. "Our results reveal the existence of infinitely many solutions with the same total instantaneous change in velocity. For the Earth-Dionysus benchmark problem, we also showed that all solutions can be classified to have a minimum of three up to a maximum of eight impulses with the same instantaneous velocity change. As we determine the lower and upper number of required impulses, we conclude that there is no unique answer to the 'how many impulses?' question, but there is a lower and upper limit on the number of impulses.”

Read the full story here.