2023 Tycho Brahe Award

Presented to: Dr. Luke Winternitz

Citation: For outstanding development of receivers and filtering algorithms that enable GNSS cislunar navigation and
pulsar-based deep-space navigation

Dr. Luke Winternitz was the system architect of NASA Goddard’s Navigator GPS receiver for the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS), which set a world record for highest GPS fix and navigates using GPS at distances reaching nearly halfway to the Moon. In this role, he led development of the signal processing approach that enabled weak GPS signal tracking above the GPS constellation, and served as GPS system engineering on the team that developed the MMS flight GPS receivers. The excellent performance of the MMS-Navigator has helped convince people that GPS/GNSS tracking can support cislunar navigation.

Dr. Winternitz was the technical lead for the team that developed NASA’s Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) X-ray pulsar navigation (XNAV) demonstration, which performed onboard navigation using pulsar observations collected with NASA’s Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) X-ray telescope on the International Space Station. This world-first experiment was a milestone in the advancement of XNAV, a long-studied technique with the potential to enable or enhance autonomous navigation of deep space probes.

Dr. Winternitz continues to work to advance high-altitude space navigation technology. He has led or contributed to numerous studies of GNSS navigation for lunar missions and has helped lead efforts to develop a next-generation lunar-capable NASA Goddard GNSS receiver, the NavCube3-mini, and to make updates to NASA Goddard’s navigation filter software, Goddard Enhanced Onboard Navigation System (GEONS), previously employed on MMS, to support upcoming missions and enable Lunar applications. Finally, he continues to pursue XNAV capability development and technical analyses for future applications.

Dr. Luke Winternitz is a navigation systems engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the Components and Hardware Systems branch. He received an ION Burka Award in 2017. He holds undergraduate degrees and an MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland.