Andrea Valmorbida received his Master Degree cum laude in Aerospace Engineering in 2009 at the University of Padova with the thesis “Collision-Avoidance Maneuvers for a Satellite Pair Flying in Tight Formation”. From 2010 to 2013 we attended the Ph.D. school in Sciences, Technologies and Measures for Space at the Center of Studies and Activities for Space “Giuseppe Colombo” (CISAS), University of Padova, working on the development and testing of Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategies for Spacecraft Formation Flying and obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2014. As part of his Ph.D. activity, in 2012 he spent a research period at the MIT Space System Laboratory, testing MPC strategies on SPHERES for the Mars Orbital Sample Return Scenario.

Since 2013, he is a post-doctoral research fellow at UniPD-CISAS, working on: (a) the development and experimental testing of relative Measurements Systems and Guidance Navigation and Control (GN&C) algorithms for satellite proximity operations, and (b) the design and build of the SPARTANS facility, which is cooperating spacecraft testbed for autonomous proximity operations experiments.

Between 2013 and 2014 he also participated to the FP7 project “Bear Electrodynamic Tether” (BETs), dealing with: (a) the study of the attitude dynamics of the end-mass and its influence on the tether dynamics during and after the deployment, and (b) the preliminary design of a low-thrust propulsion subsystem mounted on the end-mass that is necessary to unwind the tether out of the deployer keeping it constantly taut.

From 2017 to 2018 he worked on the research project “Numerical simulations for spacecraft catastrophic disruption analysis”, in cooperation with ESA. His research activity was focused on the definition and development of numeric models and algorithms to simulate hypervelocity impacts between satellites and large space debris, characterized by energy levels sufficient to cause the complete fragmentation of the impacted satellite.

From 2019 he has been working on the H2020 Future Emerging Technology OPEN project “Electrodynamic Tether Technology for Passive Consumable-less Deorbit Kit” (E.T.PACK), which aims at the development of a Deorbit Kit (DK) based on electrodynamic tether technology.