2027 Internship - Missile Guidance, Navigation, & Control (GNC)

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory•Laurel, MD

3d•Onsite

About The Position

This internship focuses on guidance, navigation, and controls (GNC) within strategic deterrence and defense. The Flight Guidance, Navigation, and Control Group is seeking engineers to aid in the design and implementation of evaluation methodology for the nation’s primary missile systems. The intern will join a team of engineers, physicists, and mathematicians who serve as independent evaluators for strategic systems, fostering an environment of innovation and learning.

Requirements

Working towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in Engineering, Physics, Math, or a related field.
Willing to learn new skills and expand capabilities.
Minimum 3.0 GPA on a 4.0 scale.
Able to obtain Interim Secret level security clearance by start date and ultimately obtain Top Secret level clearance.
U.S. citizenship.

Nice To Haves

Coursework in flight dynamics, guidance, navigation, or control.
Experience with MATLAB or another programming language such as C++.
Experience or coursework with aided inertial navigation error analysis.
Experience or coursework with Kalman filtering.
Hold an active Secret or higher-level clearance.

Responsibilities

Learn about inertial navigation with accelerometers and gyroscopes and apply knowledge to understand how such instruments work and their important sources of inaccuracy.
Develop understanding of linear dynamics models for controller design and compare performance between different GNC algorithms.
Develop optimal estimation tools for evaluating flight test dynamics and navigation of ballistic and hypersonic missile systems.
Improve existing tools and processes to analyze real flight test data.
Develop navigation, guidance, and control algorithms for 6-DOF simulations.
Extend the capabilities of an existing object-oriented accuracy analysis software library, including full life cycle support (requirements, design, implementation, performance assessment, unit and regression testing, debugging, and documentation).
Learn and utilize optimal control theory to develop guidance algorithms across multiple programs.
Work with modeling and simulation tools such as MATLAB and Simulink to generate navigation sensor models and conduct performance trade studies.
Build new architectures of navigation code for embedded environments and perform validation and testing on existing navigation code.
Perform hardware characterization and evaluation using industry standard test equipment.