Ellyne Kinney is a Principal Solutions Engineer at MDA. Her expertise lies in Aerospace Program Management and Engineering, with experience in technical program management and systems engineering for ground and space-based remote sensing missions, instrument system integration and testing, and ground as well as on-orbit calibration. She was a key contributor to projects that include the Hubble Space Telescope, Intelsat, Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA’s AURA Mission, and OSIRIS-REx Mission.

In this talk, Kinney will address sustainability concerns focused on Earth orbit use. Specifically, she will discuss the growing use of small sats and the impact of the aerospace industry following consumer electronics development methodologies of short upgrade cycles. While this enables rapid expansion of capabilities, it comes at the cost of a large amount of discarded equipment.