Robyn Woollands, Ph.D. student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, received the John V. Breakwell award for travel to the 2015 AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference in Vail, Colorado. Woollands was one of four students to receive the award.
The award of $1,000 was in support of her travel to present her paper “Parallel Generation of Extremal Field Maps for Optimal Multi-Revolution Continuous Thrust Orbit Transfers,” which she co-authored with Julie Read, Brent Macomber, Austin Probe, Ahmad Younes, who are all graduate students in aerospace engineering.
Woollands’ graduate work involves numerical integration using Modified Chebyshev Picard Iteration to solve initial and boundary value problems in celestial mechanics. She is advised by Dr. John Junkins, and has spent the last two summers interning at JPL. Prior to attending Texas A&M, she completed a master’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota, and a master’s in astronomy and a bachelor’s in physics and mathematics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.