Professor Colin R. McInnes

Colin R. McInnes, DSc, FRAes, FInstP, FRSE, FREng is Director of Research, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, UK.
 
His current research interests center on the orbital mechanics and mission applications of solar sail spacecraft. This work includes the development of families of highly non-Keplerian orbits for solar sails which can enable novel applications.
 
His other research interests center on autonomous spacecraft control, principally through the application of artificial potential field methods. This work has been developed for automated rendezvous and docking and for the distributed control of multiple spacecraft for formation-flying missions.
 
Colin is on the Editorial Board of Modern Astrodynamics and is Associate Editor of Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics which is published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) — the world’s largest technical society devoted to the global aerospace community.
 
Colin was elected a Fellow of The Royal Aeronautical Society in 1998, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001, a Fellow of The Institute of Physics in 2003, and a Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering in 2003. He received the Pardoe Space Award from the Royal Aeronautical Society in 2000, the Ackroyd Stuart Propulsion Prize from the Royal Aeronautical Society in 2004, the Makdougall Brisbane Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2006, and the Leonov Medal from the Association of Space Explorers in 2007.
 
He authored Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics, and Mission Applications, Instability of Fixed, Low-Thrust Drag Compensation, Azimuthal Repositioning of Payloads in Heliocentric Orbit Using Solar Sails, and Solar Sailing: Mission Applications and Engineering Challenges, and coauthored Control of Lagrange Point Orbits using Solar Sail Propulsion, On-Orbit Assembly Using Superquadric Potential Fields, Reconfiguring Smart Structures Using Phase Space Connections, Artificial Three-Body Equilibria for Hybrid Low-Thrust Propulsion, Robot Motion Planning using Hyperboloid Potential Functions, and A Continuum Model of Gas Flows with Localized Density Variations.
 
Colin earned his BSc (Hons) in Physics and Astronomy and his PhD in Astrodynamics from the University of Glasgow in 1988 and 1991 respectively.
 
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