Courtney Duncan

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About

Courtney Duncan is a leading figure in deep-space communications and navigation, whose work has been instrumental in advancing NASA’s ability to track and command robotic spacecraft. Her primary research focuses on software-defined radios and regenerative ranging—a technique that dramatically improves the accuracy of distance measurements between Earth and distant probes. In her seminal 2019 paper on regenerative ranging for JPL software-defined radios, Duncan demonstrated how to extract cleaner, more reliable range data from weak signals, directly enhancing mission navigation for explorers like those at Mars and beyond. With 13 citations, this work has become a key reference for engineers designing next-generation deep-space links. Duncan’s contributions are foundational to the Deep Space Network’s evolving capabilities, ensuring that as spacecraft venture farther, we can still pinpoint their positions with extraordinary precision. Her innovations not only reduce signal degradation but also enable more efficient use of limited radio bandwidth—a critical achievement for multi-mission support. For any student or researcher in aerospace engineering, Duncan’s work exemplifies how clever signal processing can solve the fundamental challenge of talking to robots across the solar system.