Andrea Accomazzo, the European Space Agency Rosetta Mission operations manager, Alessandro Baricco, director and founder of the Scuola Holden, and Diego Piacentini, Senior Vice President International...
Andrea Accomazzo
spacecraft operations manager ESA
Andrea Accomazzo is Italian, born in 1970. After high school he started at the Academy of the Italian Air Force and completed the basic training as a military pilot from 1989 to 1991. He continued engineering studies at the Politecnico di Milano and graduated in Aerospace Engineering in 1995. He worked at Fiat Avio from 1995 to 1999, mainly for the Vega launch vehicle and the Rosetta lander. He joined ESA in 1999 as Rosetta operations engineer at ESOC. After having launched Rosetta in 2004, he was nominated as Spacecraft Operations Manager for Venus Express, launched in 2005 and put into Venus orbit in 2006. At the end of 2006 he returned to Rosetta as Spacecraft Operations Manager, a role that he kept until earlier this year after Rosetta completed the hibernation phase. Since 2013, he has been head of the Solar and Planetary Missions Division in the Mission Operations Department at ESOC, and as such also the Ground Segment Manager for all missions in development (Bepi Colombo, Solar Orbiter, Juice, Exomars) and the Flight Director for Rosetta. (He likes playing football, mountain-biking, mountaineering and skiing).