August 29, 2025

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Speaker: Brandon Jones, The University of Texas at Austin

Host: Brandon Jones

Title: An Overview of Small Satellites, Recent Missions, and the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory 

Abstract: This presentation will introduce the field of small satellites (smallsats), including cube satellites, to the broader CPSH community.  The advent of the small satellite has revolutionized the space industry.  Universities can now design, build, and operate satellites at reasonable scales and budgets, which provides opportunities for research transition, data acquisition from an in-orbit platform, and workforce development.  NASA and larger companies use smallsats to demonstrate and prove experimental technologies in the operating environment at a fraction of previous costs, and companies now operate constellations with 100s to 1000s of spacecraft.  The use of smallsats for science and Earth-monitoring is growing as well.  This presentation will provide an overview of the current small satellite industry and briefly discuss some recent missions to illustrate their growing capabilities.  The presentation will conclude with an introduction to the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (TSL) and its current major mission: the SpaceCraft for Optical Position Estimation-1 (SCOPE-1).

Biography: Dr. Brandon Jones is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.  He was previously a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he also completed his Ph.D.  He conducts research in space situational awareness, multi-target filtering and tracking, computational methods for orbit state and uncertainty propagation, and satellite navigation.  Dr. Jones’s research and software tools are used as part of the intra-formation conjunction assessment system for NASA’s Magnetospheric Multi-Scale (MMS) mission.  Dr. Jones has previously work for or with the Air Force Research Laboratories, the NASA Johnson Space Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on research related to space situational awareness, uncertainty quantification, and robust mission design.  He is currently the Director of the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory and the PI for the SCOPE-1 mission.