Meet Alfonso Caldiero | Early Career Scientist
Alfonso Caldiero, a Italy researcher:
Alonso is from near Naples. He earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering in Naples and a master’s degree in the same field at TU Delft in the Netherlands. During his master’s thesis, he discovered an observatory in Brussels, which led him to complete his thesis there and then stay on for a PhD. He is now close to finishing his PhD, which focuses on geodesy, specifically the study of spacecraft trajectories around small bodies such as asteroids and comets.
The research focuses on understanding the internal structure of small bodies like asteroids, which cannot be observed directly. Instead, the approach uses how an asteroid’s internal mass distribution affects its gravity field and, in turn, the trajectory of a spacecraft orbiting it. During the PhD work, methods were developed to directly infer an asteroid’s internal mass distribution from gravity field measurements obtained from spacecraft orbits. This research is particularly timely and exciting because many missions to small bodies are currently underway or planned, providing a large amount of data to analyze.
Do you want to know more about Alfonso’s career? Watch the video below:
Learn more about Alfonso’s research:
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These videos were produced by the IUGG ECSNet. All IAG related videos are available at IAG-GGOS YouTube Channel.
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- IAG Early Career Scientist Page: https://geodesy.science/ecs/
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