Bharat Mahajan, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, received the John V. Breakwell student award for travel to the 27th American Astronautical Society (AAS)/American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Space Flight Mechanics meeting held in San Antonio, Texas, Feb. 5-9. The award of $1,000 was in support of his travel to present two papers, “Exact Normalization of the Tesseral Harmonics” and "Analytic Solution of Perturbed Relative Motion with Zonal and Tesseral Harmonics," which he co-authored with his advisers, Drs. Srinivas R. Vadali and Kyle T. Alfriend, who are professors in the department.
Mahajan’s research involves artificial satellite theory with zonal and tesseral perturbations and its applications to long-term propagation of satellite relative motion. He has a master's degree in aerospace engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology at Rolla. His research interests include analytic satellite theory, formation flying, attitude control and the three-body problem.