Stephanie Thomas, Vice President – sjthomas at psatellite.com

Education

• SM Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001
• SB Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999

Professional History

As Vice President of PSS, Ms. Thomas helps manage the company in addition to performing and managing technical work on our government and consulting contracts. She has recently been selected to be a 2016 NASA NIAC fellow for the study, “Fusion-Enabled Pluto Orbiter and Lander”, collaborating with PPPL.

Ms. Thomas has been the PI for numerous Air Force and NASA SBIRs ranging from solar sails to proximity satellite operations. As a senior engineer she has led consulting work on precision CubeSat attitude control systems and propellantless solar sail control systems for customer including NASA and ESA. She manages the commercial MATLAB toolbox product lines for PSS and developed the Solar Sail Module for high-fidelity simulation of sailcraft control systems. She has developed collision monitoring tools for the safe guidance mode of the Swedish Space Corporation’s PRISMA mission and TechSat 21.

Prior to joining the technical staff full-time in February of 2001, Ms. Thomas worked at PSS in a series of internships since 1996. She has worked on a variety of software, including: artificial intelligence and decision support tools, an interplanetary orbit propagation toolbox, Java web services, and a multibody simulation of the TDRS spacecraft for momentum management verification. She is experienced in MATLAB, C++, and Java technical programming.

As a Master’s student at MIT, Ms. Thomas worked on the design of a Shuttle flight experiment to study the plumes of a Hall and a pulsed plasma thruster, known as ETEEV (Electric Thruster Environmental Effects Verification). This effort included experimental work in MIT’s new vacuum facility. The design studies included analysis of a number of plasma diagnostics. While a student Ms. Thomas participated in NASA Academy, a summer leadership intensive program, at NASA/GSFC.