Carolina Isabel Restrepo passed on February 24, 2024, after a long battle with cancer. She was 41 years old. Born in Bryan, TX, while her parents were students at Texas A&M University, she spent her childhood in Medellin, Colombia, and La Paz, Bolivia, before returning to College Station to study aerospace engineering.
Restrepo completed her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University under the guidance of Drs. John Valasek and John Hurtado. She began her NASA career as an intern in 2003 as part of the NASA co-op program at NASA Johnson Space Center.
In 2009, she began working full-time at NASA Johnson Space Center with the Crewed Exploration Vehicle, which later became Orion. Restrepo's focus was analyzing how to automate the process of determining launch abort trajectories. During a four-year work rotation to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Restrepo worked on the Autonomous Landing Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) team designing autonomous entry, descent, and landing technologies for different planetary bodies. Returning to NASA Johnson, she joined Orion’s orbit team and worked on ALHAT follow-on projects to further improve autonomous precision-landing technologies.
Moving to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as an aerospace engineer in the Navigation and Mission Design Branch, Restrepo began working on lunar descents and landings with the Lunar Navigation Maps (LuNaMaps) project, which she developed and led. Her work focused on navigation for landing at the south pole of the moon. She was developing the processes to build the reference terrain maps that future instruments on board the lunar landing module will use to navigate the ship during the descent.
Restrepo actively served in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). She was a member of the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Technical Committee from 2019 to 2023. As a passionate student mentor, she contributed to the organization of the GNC Graduate Student Paper Competition. NASA also recognized her with a Game Changing Development Mentorship Award in 2022.
Restrepo leaves behind her husband of fifteen years, Dr. Daniel Araya, whom she met while they were NASA interns and students in the aerospace engineering department at Texas A&M University, and their two children, Leila and Oliver. The love and passion she had for NASA, space, and aerospace engineering paled in comparison to the love she had for her family.
Restrepo had an incredible ability to connect people across different parts of her life, and she maintained deep relationships with childhood and college friends, neighbors, and colleagues from across the three NASA centers in which she worked. She is greatly missed by her family, friends, and colleagues.