FROM THE MOON TO THE KUIPER BELT: NAVIGATING SPACECRAFT ACROSS OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Spacecraft navigation is a critical enabling capability for exploration across the Solar System, from the Moon to asteroids and the Kuiper Belt.

This seminar will present the interplanetary flight dynamics and optical navigation work carried out by KinetX, an Intuitive Machines company, drawing on experience from missions including New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx/OSIRIS-APEx, Lucy, LunaH-Map, and Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander missions.

The talk will highlight how navigation teams combine imaging, astrometry, dynamical modeling, and operational decision-making to guide spacecraft through complex and uncertain mission environments, offering insight into the technical foundations and real-world operations behind successful Solar System exploration.

Speakers:

Coralie Adam leads the multi-mission Interplanetary Flight Dynamics team at KinetX, an Intuitive Machines company. She also currently serves as the executive vice president of the board of the American Astronautical Society. During her 15 years at KinetX, Coralie has contributed to the optical navigation development and operations that enabled the first exploration of the Pluto system and the historic sample collection of near-Earth asteroid Bennu. Coralie is currently the acting Navigation Team Chief on the Lucy mission, a navigation lead and science co-investigator on OSIRIS-APEx, and supporting several commercial and government exploration initiatives to the moon and beyond. She holds degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Derek Nelson is the Optical Navigation (OpNav) Group Lead at KinetX/Intuitive Machines and oversees OpNav projects for NASA's OSIRIS-APEX and Lucy missions, as well as Intuitive Machines' lunar lander and constellation missions. He has worked on deep space navigation at KinetX for over 13 years, and has experience navigating NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and Arrokoth, and NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. He is currently the Navigation Team Chief for New Horizons, and was previously Navigation Team Chief for NASA's LunaH-Map lunar CubeSat mission. He holds degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder and Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

18.06.2026