GMAT Engineer

GMAT Engineer – NASA Support

FDSS Greenbelt, Maryland

About Us

Pearl River Technologies is an SBA certified HUBZone small disadvantaged business (SDB) providing professional, technical and administrative support services to federal, state and local government agencies. Through our support and commitment to the HUBZone program, we successfully offer our customers the highest quality of service, while creating opportunities and growth for our employees.

Description

Pearl River Technologies is seeking a highly qualified candidate to provide spacecraft navigation expertise in support of NASA’s General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT). GMAT is the world’s only enterprise, multi-mission, open source software for space mission design, optimization, and navigation. The system supports missions in flight regimes ranging from low Earth orbit to lunar, libration point, and deep space missions. GMAT is developed by a team of NASA, private industry, public, and private contributors and is used for real-world mission support, engineering studies, as a tool for education, and public engagement. GMAT contains models of real world objects such as spacecraft and thrusters, and analysis "objects" such as propagators, plots, and reports. These objects are used in a mission sequence in which the user employs commands supported by the system to model mission events and perform estimation.

Specific areas of support will include:

· Performing, evaluating, and enhancing daily orbit determination and prediction for various missions-supported spacecraft

· Overseeing and conducting navigation-related analyses

· Evaluating current GMAT navigation processes to identify possible improvements and promote advancements and enhancements

Required Degree: Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related discipline.

Required Experience: 5 years of professional experience. Master’s degree counts as 2 years professional experience.

Required Skills:

· Experience in flight dynamics for a variety of orbit regimes

· Thorough understanding of both batch least squares and Kalman filter estimation

· In-depth knowledge of spacecraft navigation and orbital mechanics concepts

· Proven expertise with satellite orbit determination (OD) and OD tools

· Proven expertise with orbit design and modeling tools such as STK

· Experience designing and conducting comprehensive orbit analyses

· Ability to apply problem solving methodologies to complex and ambiguous problems

· Must have excellent interpersonal, written, and oral communication skills.

Desired Skills:

· Experience utilizing satellite tracking data, including GPS, radiometric, and/or optometric measurements

· Familiarization with NASA tracking networks – Space Network, Near Earth Network, and/or Deep Space Network – including operations and tracking observation types

· Knowledge of spacecraft communications and ground systems architecture

· Experience with the following orbit determination tools: ODTK, GMAT, FreeFlyer, Goddard Trajectory Determination System (GTDS), Monte, and GEODyn

· Experience in a spacecraft operations environment

· Experience developing tools in Python, Perl, and/or Matlab

· Experience with large scale data analytics and application/development of new algorithms for evaluation and automated processing

· Experience with Windows and Linux environments

Other Requirements:

US citizenship required / EEO/AA / E-Verify Participation

As an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer, Pearl River Technologies LLC provides equal employment opportunity to all employees and applicants without regard to an individual's protected status, including race/ethnicity, color, national origin, ancestry, religion, creed, age, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, including pregnancy, childbirth, or related conditions, disability, military service, veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected status