Giacomo Acciarini

I am a Research Fellow in Differentiable Programming / Intelligence at the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team (ACT), since September 2025.

I hold a BSc in Aerospace Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and an MSc in Space Exploration from TU Delft. In July 2025, I completed my PhD at the Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey, in collaboration with the ESA Advanced Concepts Team. My PhD thesis, titled "Space Trajectory Design in Uncertain Environments", focused on developing robust and AI-driven methods for designing space trajectories under uncertainty.

In 2021 I worked as a researcher for the University of Oxford AI4Science Lab on developing and expanding the functionalities of a probabilistic programming simulator for spacecraft collision avoidance, called Kessler. Finally, since 2020 I have been working both as a researcher and mentor in collaboration with the Frontier Development Lab: a public-private partnership on AI research applied to space problems, in partnership with NASA, ESA, Google Cloud and NVIDIA. During these years I worked on AI applied to orbital propagation, collision avoidance, thermospheric density estimation and more.

My main research interests are: nonlinear systems with special focus on astrodynamics, probabilistic machine learning, scientific machine learning (neuralODEs, neural implicit representations, etc.), uncertainty propagation & quantification.

You can find a list of my publications in Google Scholar, and some of the open-source projects I made/contributed to in Github.

In my free time... wait, what free time? Jokes aside I enjoy reading (especially Kafka) and playing chess.

Please do not hesistate to email me moc.liamg@iniraicca.omocaig or connect on LinkedIn.

Research at the Advanced Concepts Team

• Giacomo Acciarini
  Space Trajectory Design in Uncertain Environments
  PhD Thesis
• Dario Izzo, Sebastien Origer, Giacomo Acciarini, Francesco Biscani
  High-order expansion of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations flows
  to appear in Science Advances
  [arXiv]
• Giacomo Acciarini, Dario Izzo, and Francesco Biscani
  EclipseNETs: Learning Irregular Small Celestial Body Silhouettes
  Acta Astronautica vol. 236, pages 514-521, 2025
  [Article] [arXiv]
• Giacomo Acciarini, Atılım Güneş Baydin, and Dario Izzo
  Closing the Gap Between SGP4 and High-Precision Propagation via Differentiable Programming
  Acta Astronautica vol. 226, pages 694-701, 2024
  [Open-Access Journal] [arXiv]
• Giacomo Acciarini, Nicola Baresi, David J. B. Lloyd, and Dario Izzo
  Nonlinear Propagation of Non-Gaussian Uncertainties
  to appear in Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics
  [arXiv]
• Giacomo Acciarini, Nicola Baresi, David J. B. Lloyd, and Dario Izzo
  Design of Robust Trajectories around Binary Asteroids via Moment Maps
  Proceedings of the 75th International Astronautical Congress 2024
  [link]
• Max Bannach, Giacomo Acciarini, and Dario Izzo
  On the Keplerian TSP and VRP: Benchmarks and Encoding Techniques
  Proceedings of the 75th International Astronautical Congress 2024
  [link]
• Max Bannach, Giacomo Acciarini, Jai Grover, and Dario Izzo
  Reliability of Constellations with Inter-Satellite Communication
  Proceedings of the 75th International Astronautical Congress 2024
  [link]
• Sebastien Origer, Dario Izzo, Giacomo Acciarini, Francesco Biscani, Rita Mastroianni, Max Bannach, and Harry Holt
  Certifying Guidance & Control Networks: Uncertainty Propagation to an Event Manifold
  Proceedings of the 75th International Astronautical Congress 2024
  
• Giacomo Acciarini, Francesco Biscani, and Dario Izzo
  EclipseNETs: A Differentiable Description of Irregular Eclipse Conditions
  SPAICE2024: The First Joint European Space Agency / IAA Conference
  [arXiv]
• Dario Izzo, Marcus Märtens, Laurent Beauregard, Max Bannach, Giacomo Acciarini, Emmanuel Blazquez, Alexander Hadjiivanov, Jai Grover, Gernot Heißel, Yuri Shimane, and Chit Hong Yam
  Asteroid Mining: ACT&Friends' Results for the GTOC 12 Problem
  to appear in Astrodynamics 2025
  [arXiv]
• Max Bannach, Emmanuel Blazquez, Dario Izzo, Giacomo Acciarini, Alexander Hadjiivanov, Gernot Heißel, Jai Grover, Yuri Shimane, and Chit Hong Yam
  The Space Optimization Competition
  Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion 2024
  [Website] [GECCO]
• Flavio Tagliaferri, Emmanuel Blazquez, Giacomo Acciarini, and Dario Izzo
  Global Optimization for Trajectory Design via Invariant Manifolds in the Earth-Moon Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem
  Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics 2024
  [arXiv]
• Dario Izzo, Giacomo Acciarini, and Francesco Biscani
  NeuralODEs for VLEO Simulations: Introducing ThermoNET for Thermosphere Modeling
  Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics 2024
  [arXiv]
• Laurent Beauregard, Dario Izzo, and Giacomo Acciarini
  Breaking Traditions: Introducing a Surrogate Primer Vector in Non-Keplerian Dynamics
  Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics 2024
  [arXiv]
• Giacomo Acciarini, Nicola Baresi, David J. B. Lloyd, and Dario Izzo
  Stochastic Continuation of Trajectories in the Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem via Differential Algebra
  Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics 2024
  [arXiv]
• Giacomo Acciarini, Laurent Beauregard, and Dario Izzo
  Computing Low-Thrust Transfers in the Asteroid Belt: A Comparison Between Astrodynamical Manipulations and a Machine Learning Approach
  Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics 2024
  [arXiv]
• Giacomo Acciarini, Edward Brown, Thomas E. Berger, Madhulika Guhathakurta, James Parr, Christopher Bridges and Atılım Güneş Baydin
  Improving Thermospheric Density Predictions in Low-Earth Orbit with Machine Learning
  Space Weather Vol. 22 (2), e2023SW003652
  [Open-Access Journal]