Brenton Duffy

The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment. ~Johannes Kepler

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Personal Introduction

My name is Brenton Duffy and I am a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. My speciality is guidance and control in astronautical systems with a focus on multi-body systems, low-thrust propulsion, and formation-flying.

Lagrange Points

I successfully defended my dissertation on March 23, 2012 in front of a committee made up of GW professors David Chichka, James Lee, Taeyoung Lee and Helmut Haberzettl and APL Mission Design Engineers Christopher Scott and Martin Ozimek. The title of my dissertation is "Analytical Methods and Perturbation Theory for the Elliptic Restricted Three-Body Problem of Astrodynamics." The goal of the project was to develop analytical models for the elliptic restricted three-body problem (ERTBP), which consists of a spacecraft flying within the gravitational potential field generated by a non-circular planet-moon system. Please visit my Research and Publications pages for more details and access to the research documentation.