Malcolm D. Shuster

Malcolm D. Shuster (31 July 1943 – 23 February 2012) was an American physicist and aerospace engineer, whose work contributed significantly to spacecraft attitude determination.^[1][2] In 1977 he joined the Attitude Systems Operation of the Computer Sciences Corporation in Silver Spring, Maryland, during which time he developed the QUaternion ESTimator (QUEST) algorithm for static attitude determination.^[3] He later, with F. Landis Markley, helped to develop the standard implementation of the Kalman filter used in spacecraft attitude estimation.^[2] During his career, he authored roughly fifty technical papers^[4][2] on subjects in physics and spacecraft engineering, many of which have become seminal within the field of attitude estimation; his 1993 "A survey of attitude representations" is still the canonical reference.^[5] He held teaching assignments at Johns Hopkins University, Howard University, Carnegie-Mellon University and Tel-Aviv University.^[1] In 2000 the American Astronautical Society awarded him the Dirk Brouwer Award.^[6][3] In June 2005 the American Astronautical Society held a special three-day Astronautics symposium in his honor^[7]

Malcolm Shuster in 2005