Alinda Mashiku, Ph.D.

Dr. Alinda Mashiku is the Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) Program Manager at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center since August 2022. Prior to her current role, she served as the CARA Deputy Program Manager and Technical Lead from 2019. The CARA program is an agency function that is responsible for providing risk analysis for all non-crewed missions for collision avoidance and ensuring the safety of the space environment. In this role, she is responsible for providing technical leadership for ground operations elements, interfacing with multiple mission operations centers and providing oversight in various advanced technologies and engineering application areas. Dr. Mashiku joined the CARA team in 2018 as a CARA Systems and Research Engineer performing analysis and research for operational support in various areas such as data analytics for machine learning and artificial intelligence for conjunction assessment and risk analysis.

Dr. Mashiku joined NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2013 after completing her PhD as a NASA GSRP fellow, supporting various missions as a spacecraft navigation and mission trajectory design engineer. From the time she joined NASA, she worked on the OSIRIS-Rex mission performing several tasks such as reconnaissance-site targeting, trajectory dispersion analysis, solar radiation pressure and thermal effects for orbit stability and satellite interplanetary orbit determination. She also spent some time working on the James Webb Space Telescope analyzing the libration orbit control-box dispersions from the launch window analysis outputs.