Markley, F. Landis

Dr. Markley's education consists of a Ph. D. in Theoretical Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1967, National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship 1962-66, Bachelor of Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1962, National Merit Scholarship 1957-61, John McMullin Regional Scholarship 1961-62 and election to Tau Beta Pi, engineering honorary society.

Dr. Markley is internationally recognized in the spacecraft attitude determination and control community. He directed a team that developed a FORTRAN prototype of the onboard attitude determination and control software for the Solar Maximum Mission spacecraft. He played a key role in specifying, developing, and testing the attitude determination and control algorithms for the SAMPEX, TRMM, and XTE spacecraft. He was a major contributor to the widely-used book Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, edited by James R. Wertz. He is the co-author of a widely-cited survey article on Kalman filtering for spacecraft attitude determination, which was presented as an invited paper at the 20th Aerospace Sciences Meeting of the AIAA and was translated into Russian for publication in the Soviet journal Aeronautics/Space Technology. He has developed and published innovative algorithms for attitude determination and parameter estimation using vector observations such as star tracker measurements. He headed a team that developed the algorithms and the software implementation of the general-purpose Attitude Determination Error Analysis System, which is used to develop specifications for attitude determination systems, and presented a paper on these error analysis methods at the international symposium on Space Dynamics at CNES, Toulouse, France, in October 1989. He used his analytic, software, and management talents to lead a NASA/contractor team in developing a zero-gyro safemode for Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The smooth coordination of this team was crucial for taking the project from initial concept to flight readiness in four months, a tight schedule necessitated by the failure of two of the six precise HST gyros. This safemode maintained HST in a power and thermally safe state for 38 consecutive days prior to the most recent Hubble Servicing Mission last December. Dr. Markley developed the attitude control concept for the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), which was selected as one of the first two Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) missions. This spacecraft, launched in June 2001, created the most precise, high-resolution map of the cosmic microwave background ever, in order to determine the values of key cosmological parameters and answer questions about the formation of structure in the early universe.

Dr. Markley's service to American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) includes two terms as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics and membership on the Guidance, Navigation, and Control, Technical Committee since 1995. He was Program Co-Chair of the 1998 Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference in Boston. He received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 1994 and the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award in 1998.