Montaruli Marco Felice

Marco Felice Montaruli is Assistant Professor at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi) since July 2023.

Marco Felice research focuses on Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST), which was first approached during a 6 months internship in the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), from 2018 to 2019, where he worked on the short-term probability of collision assessment and impulsive collision avoidance maneuver planning. From 2019 to 2022 he pursued doctoral research in Aerospace Engineering in Politecnico di Milano. His Ph.D. research mainly focused on the operations and upgrade of the survey array radars devoted to SST applications. Directly connected to this topic, he developed a strong expertise in Orbit Determination (OD) techniques and in all the SST services: collision avoidance, satellite re-entry and fragmentations. Related to this last subject, he developed a stochastic approach to detect the fragmentation epoch from a single fragment OD. This procedure was also refined during a visiting research period in the European Space Operations Centre - Space Debris Office of the European Space Agency (ESOC, ESA). All these activities contributed to draw up the Ph.D. thesis, which was received the Cum Laude award.

During the period as postdoctoral research fellow (from November 2022 to July 2023) Marco Felice continued his research on SST-related subjects, and his expertise in this framework allowed him to support the operations of the Italian Space Situational Awareness Centre (C-SSA) of AM, the most remarkable being the Long-March re-entry campaign of November 2022. As postdoctoral research fellow, Marco Felice had the opportunity to be Italian delegate at the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), in June 2023.

The current research, as Assistant Professor and Junior Researcher, keeps focusing on Space Surveillance and Tracking and in particular: fragmentation events, correlation, orbit determination, conjunction analysis, re-entry events, resident space objects characterization, SST sensor data processing, radar technologies for SST applications, and cislunar space situational awareness. He is adjunct member of the Faculty Board of the PhD Program in Aerospace Engineering in Politecnico di Milano, and lecturer of the Ph.D. course in Space Traffic Management since the academic year 2024-2025.

In 2024, Marco Felice was awarded the Premio Arnaldo Rancati 2024 by the Istituto Lombardo – Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, which is granted to an Italian scholar under the age of 35 who is deemed worthy for an original study contributing to the advancement of both aeronautics and technical industry in general. From March to June 2025, he has been visiting researcher in University of Seville, where he worked on advanced techniques for initial orbit determination from radar measurements. In December 2025, Marco Felice was awarded as beneficiary for the TEF Post Doc – Call for Ideas for Postdoctoral Research, with a research program entitled “Space Surveillance Infrastructure for Emerging Countries”.

Besides PoliMi, University of Seville, ESA and CNES, during his working experience Marco Felice had the opportunity to collaborate with the Italian Astrophysics Institute (INAF), Italian Airforce (AM), Vitrociset S.p.A., Leonardo S.p.A, Telespazio S.p.A., Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the European SST consortium (EUSST).

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