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About

Julie Thienel is a leading expert in spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control, with a particular focus on autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations. Her groundbreaking work has been instrumental in advancing the state estimation and tracking of non-cooperative target vehicles—a critical capability for future robotic servicing missions. Thienel’s most cited paper, “Hubble Space Telescope Angular Velocity Estimation During the Robotic Servicing Mission” (2006, 56 citations), details her development of algorithms to estimate the Hubble Space Telescope’s attitude and rates using vision-based sensors, enabling a safe capture by the proposed Hubble Robotic Vehicle. Her follow-up work, “Accurate State Estimation and Tracking of a Non-Cooperative Target Vehicle” (2006, 31 citations), further extends these techniques to autonomous space rendezvous scenarios where target telemetry is unavailable. These contributions have directly informed NASA’s approach to on-orbit servicing and debris mitigation. With a career spanning over two decades, Thienel’s research continues to shape the future of autonomous space operations, making her a pivotal figure in the field.