Ava Thrasher

Ava Thrasher is a research engineer at the Space Exploration and Analysis Laboratory (SEAL) at Georgia Institute of Technology, focusing on optical navigation solutions for space missions since May 2024. Previously, Ava served as a graduate research assistant working on a LIDAR navigation system for Intuitive Machines' lunar lander, NOVA-C, and gained valuable experience through internships at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and NASA, where contributions included terrain relative navigation solutions, gravity offset testing configurations, and computational fluid dynamic simulations. Ava holds a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Engineering in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, with a commitment to advancing space exploration technologies.