Hagop Chinchinian is an engineer in Aerospace's Tracking Architecture and Performance department, where, as he puts it, they're "monitoring the global GPS and signal environment, understanding when anomalies occur and why they occur, and making that capability available to operators."

As you can imagine, this kind of tracking and analysis is vital for situational awareness and resiliency of both national security and commercial space, adding immediacy and relevance to the work.

Technically minded from an early age, Chinchinian grew up in LA, where he was "surrounded by cool things in the space industry," including JPL; as an aspiring engineer he attended their open houses for years. He studied electrical engineering at Stanford and then did graduate work in Computer Science, positioning him perfectly for the group he works in now.

"Aerospace is a really exciting place to work — you get to have a really high level perspective of the industry," he said. "And there's a level of expertise... there are people on my team who have worked in a very specific domain for longer than I've been alive."

"What gets me excited every morning is being able to solve hard technical problems that our customers have, and at the same time growing technically and learning from all the knowledge Aerospace has."

Innovation Spotlight tells the stories of Aerospace's team and how they got into this fast-moving industry — check out some more here!