Tom Gorton

Tom Gorton has worked in the field of GN&C since 1995. Tom began their career at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company as a GN&C Staff Engineer, where they worked on the IRIDIUM Satellite and Special Space Programs. Tom'sduties included attitude control, thruster control, structural bending mode filters, feed forward torque compensation, safe mode backup attitude control, Sun sensors, reaction wheels, friction estimation loop, and pointing and stability analysis.

In 2001, Gorton joined Octant Technologies as a GN&C Senior Staff Engineer, where they worked on the XSS10, XSS11, ANGELS, and MKV programs. Tom developed a target acquisition and tracking image processing algorithm to detect and track space objects in a stellar background, as well as a rendezvous and proximity operations GN&C algorithm design. Tom also developed and verified the performance of an extended kalman filter relative navigation algorithm which uses angle and range measurements fused together from four separate sensors, and a reaction wheel controller and momentum management algorithm.

In 2010, Gorton moved to Broad Reach Engineering (formerly Octant Technologies) as a GN&C Senior Staff Engineer.

From 2013 to 2020, Gorton worked at Millennium Engineering and Integration, where they were a Model Based Development Principal Engineer. Tom was a member of the model based development group working mostly with NASA and MDA to bring Simulink model based development to aerospace applications. Tom generated C code from Simulink models with custom TLC templates and custom targets, and built custom S-functions to integrate external C code into Matlab/Simulink models. Tom also developed navigation algorithms employing Kalman filter sensor fusion techniques for a sensor suite consisting of accelerometer, GPS, and magnetometer sensors.

In 2020, Gorton joined Apple as an Autonomous Systems, Special Projects Group.

Currently, Gorton is a Lead GNC Engineer at Albedo, a position they have held since 2022.

Tom Gorton received their B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a focus in Control Systems from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. Tom then went on to receive their M.S. in Dynamics and Control Systems from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995.