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About

Joshua Hopkins is a leading aerospace engineer whose work bridges human spaceflight, planetary science, and planetary defense. His research centers on lunar exploration architectures, teleoperated robotics, and asteroid deflection techniques. Hopkins is best known for conceptualizing the "Moon Diver" mission, a Discovery-class concept that proposes sending a rover to rappel into a lunar mare pit to directly examine exposed volcanic strata—a novel approach to understanding the Moon’s secondary crust formation. His foundational 2012 paper on a lunar L2-Farside mission using Orion and a teleoperated lander/rover (76 citations) helped define how crewed spacecraft could enable remote science on the lunar farside. He also contributed to planetary defense with his "Enhanced Gravity Tractor" technique (24 citations), improving upon the original concept by using a spacecraft’s gravitational pull to slowly deflect hazardous asteroids. Notably, Hopkins demonstrated astronaut-controlled telerobotic rover operations from the International Space Station, a critical precursor for future lunar missions. With over 150 total citations, his work continues to shape NASA’s approach to combining human exploration with robotic precision.