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Damennick Henry
Postdoctoral Scholar, Smead Aerospace
Friday, Feb. 21 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 114

Abstract: A new chapter in space exploration has begun, driven by an ambitious goal to develop a sustainable robotic and human presence on the Moon. Within the next decade, national and international entities from the public and private sectors will embark on missions with important objectives ranging from the search for water on the Lunar surface to the demonstration of critical life support technologies in deep space. The pursuit of these goals ensures a future proliferation of vehicles operating in cislunar space, a region in which motion is heavily influenced by the gravitational pull of the Earth and Moon. Together, the Earth and Moon’s gravities create a chaotic dynamical environment that vehicles must operate within. Lunar development demands a robust understanding of these complex dynamics.

Organization within cislunar space’s dynamics can be uncovered by leveraging dynamical systems theory, a branch of applied mathematics that allows us to construct a geometric picture of motion in chaotic systems. Typically, the building blocks of the geometric picture are special solutions such as equilibrium points and periodic orbits along with their stable and unstable manifolds. This talk will present recent research that focuses on leveraging quasi-periodic orbits, a generalized class of bounded motion. Quasi-periodic orbits occur much more frequently and can therefore be utilized to form a more complete understanding of cislunar motion. The seminar will illustrate the benefits of this more complete picture by showing how it can be applied to enable key technologies for Lunar development such as the fuel-efficient maneuvering between various cislunar regions, the accurate mapping of orbits near the Moon, and the coordination of multiple vehicles in unstable regimes.

Bio: Damennick Henry is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the VADeR Laboratory at the University of Colorado. In the fall of 2025, he will begin as an assistant professor in the Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics department at the University of Minnesota where his research will focus on developing geometric theory and computational techniques to uncover order in chaotic dynamical environments that the next generation of spacecraft will operate in. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2018 and PhD in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú´«Ã½ÎÄ»¯×÷Æ· in 2024 as a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow and Smead Scholar.