Matthew Abrahamson was born on October 29, 1984, in Glens Falls, NY, and spent his entire childhood in Hudson Falls. He participated in cross country, indoor track, and track & field varsity athletics at Hudson Falls High School and was also active in the music and drama departments. Matt graduated as valedictorian of the Hudson Falls Class of 2002 and attended MIT in Cambridge, MA, the following autumn.
After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2006, Matt was selected as a Draper Laboratory Fellow to fund his Masters of Science research at MIT. As a fellow, Matt was mentored by engineers who developed the flight computer for the Apollo missions to the Moon and researched concepts for autonomous deep space navigation. He received his Masters of Science degree in 2008 and accepted an offer to work for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA.
At JPL, Matt served as a mission navigator on a variety of exploration missions. On November 4, 2010, he helped navigate the EPOXI spacecraft within 700km of the comet Hartley 2 to snap photographs of the comet core while traveling at 12 kilometers per second. Over the next few years, Matt supported the Stardust-NExT flyby of comet Tempel 1, the Juno launch to Jupiter, and the Dawn imaging campaign at the asteroid Vesta.
Matt served as the mission manager for the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) instrument on the International Space Station (ISS). On June 5, 2014, OPALS demonstrated the transmission of a high-definition video from the ISS to a California ground station using laser communications. Matt and his team operated OPALS for three years, conducting over fifty laser experiments with ground telescopes in California, Germany, France, and the Canary Islands.
Matt has led several sessions at Hudson Falls High School to discuss the math and science behind space exploration. In 2014, he presented a TEDx talk titled “Opening New Worlds with Space Navigation” on the UCLA campus. In his free time, he enjoys camping in the Adirondacks and bonfires on Spring Street with his brother, Michael Abrahamson, and his parents, Thomas and Helen Deyette, of Hudson Falls.