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About

Cheryl Reed is a space systems engineer whose career has centered on spacecraft navigation, autonomous landing technologies, and lunar exploration infrastructure, with much of her work conducted at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in collaboration with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. She is perhaps best known for her contributions to APLNav, a passive optical terrain relative navigation system designed to enable precision landing on the Moon and small planetary bodies. This system, developed over more than a decade, represents a significant advance in autonomous onboard navigation capability and has garnered 19 citations as one of the field's key reference works. Reed has also contributed meaningfully to NASA's Robotic Lunar Lander Project, helping shape mission concepts and risk reduction strategies at a critical period of renewed lunar exploration interest. Earlier in her career, she explored scalable navigation and communication architectures to support sustained lunar operations, work that laid conceptual groundwork for the infrastructure needed under NASA's Exploration Initiative. Across her published portfolio, Reed's research reflects a consistent commitment to making robotic and human lunar missions more capable, reliable, and operationally sustainable.