Sun Hur-Diaz
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Seminar Information
Autonomous navigation is a critical priority for NASA, appearing multiple times in the Civil Space Shortfall Ranking of 2024 and 2026. To address these technological gaps and meet the growing demand for autonomous space missions, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has developed the autonomous Navigation, Guidance, and Control (autoNGC) system. This seminar will provide an overview of the autoNGC architecture, discuss its current development status, and showcase both recent and upcoming demonstration missions.
Dr. Sun Hur-Diaz is a member of the Space Situational Awareness and Navigation Branch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She currently serves as the Principal Investigator for the autonomous Navigation, Guidance, and Control (autoNGC) technology project. Previously, Dr. Hur-Diaz was the Flight Dynamics Lead for Phase A of the DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) mission. She was also the flight dynamics, navigation, and attitude control systems engineer on the Lunar IceCube mission, a 6U CubeSat secondary payload flown on Artemis I.
Before joining NASA as a civil servant, Dr. Hur-Diaz made significant contributions to the agency as a contractor. Most notably, she developed the onboard attitude Kalman filter and controller for the Hubble Space Telescope’s One-Gyro Science mode—which serves as the observatory's primary operations mode today. She also contributed to the development of the next-generation Search-and- Rescue beacons - Advanced Next-Generation Emergency Locator (ANGEL) beacons for use on the life vests for Artemis astronauts returning from the Moon.
Her extensive industry experience also includes serving as the Principal Investigator for the Cluster Flight System on DARPA’s System F6 project, a Flight Dynamics Engineer at Intelsat, and an Orbit and Attitude Systems Engineer at Space Systems/Loral (now Lanteris Space Systems).
Dr. Hur-Diaz holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University, as well as a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.