Autor/-in: Eelco Doornbos

Eelco Doornbos was born in Groenlo, The Netherlands, on April 8, 1975 and went to school in Cappelle aan den IJssel, Rotterdam and Maastricht. After obtaining his diploma at Sint Maartenscollege in Maastricht, he started studying aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology in 1994.
His master’s thesis, completed in August 2001, was on the topic of nongravitational force modelling in the orbit determination of ESA’s ERS and Envisat Earth observation satellites. Work on this thesis was performed at Hypersonic Technology Göttingen (HTG), the European Space Operations Centre (ESA/ESOC) in Darmstadt and within the Astrodynamics & Space Systems group at TU Delft.
After graduation, he initially started work on several projects related to satellite radar altimetry and precise orbit determination of radar altimeter satellites. The year 2003 marked the start of a transition to a series of research projects performed for the European Space Agency (ESA), aimed at the development and testing of algorithms for deriving thermospheric density from satellite observations,
and the improvement of thermosphere density models. The work performed for these ESA-funded projects forms the backbone of this thesis.