Charting a course After moving cross country and starting a new job, I’ve finally settled down enough to make some more progress on my python simulations (thanks to having a long weekend without traveling). I’m moving on to setting up a Python lander simulation with some Martian terrain. I’d like to mess around with some … More Mapping it out
One of the disadvantages of being out of college is your free MATLAB subscription goes away. As a result, I’m making the switch to Python. Besides consistently being off-by-one due to zero indexing, I like Python quite a bit. Getting a 4th order RK solver to work was about as intuitive as getting ode45 to … More Getting snake-y
via Daily Prompt: Bliss Enjoying the breeze inside the shade on a hot summer’s day. Curling up on the couch with a hot drink while it’s snowing outside. Spending a Sunday reading a good book. Spending a Saturday watching good college football. Solving a hard problem, acing a rough test. I’m surprised at how many … More Bliss
As part of my Master’s degree, I took a Robotics independent study class in my last semester. After 4 years of undergrad and one semester of grad school, I finally got to explore my own completely independent project over the course of a 3 month semester (this was all in early 2017, I’m just getting … More Learning to land
via Daily Prompt: Degree I’ll take radians over degrees any day. Math defaults to radians – whether you need to calculate an arc length or a direction cosine matrix, things are so much easier when you go with radians. It is true that we intuitively understand degrees better, the same way Americans intuitively understand Fahrenheit … More Say no to degrees
Background My senior design course involved creating a baseline design for a mission to Titan, Saturn’s most well-known moon. We picked Titan because it has amazing potential for breakthrough discoveries from both a planetary science and astrobiology perspective. This is largely due to the methane atmosphere and carbon rich environment. A methane atmosphere means a “methane … More Titan Entry, Descent, & Landing
Been a while, I know. November was brutal. Somehow I have more work despite fewer credits. Built some CubeSat reaction wheels though, which was pretty cool. Also managed to fix up the simulation software a bit more. I added real orbital dynamics this time around. Previously I had been propagating the time from the simulation … More Orbits with Attitude
Earlier this week, the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory posted this video of the sun observed through multiple wavelengths in ultra HD (4k). This is a pretty amazing view of the sun. Making observations in different wavelengths allows astrophysicists to view different behaviors on the sun’s surface, and allows them to “filter” out certain behaviors so they can … More Solar Sightseeing & Science (in 4k)
Its a fall weekend, so some form of football, whether it be college or NFL, is on most people’s minds. But football isn’t the only place where interceptions are interesting. Interplanetary interception trajectories are pretty amazing in their own right. They are the only way for us to actually reach another planet efficiently. For example, if … More Interplanetary Interception
One of the cooler things I learned in the first half of this term is how to plot an orbit in 3D over a sphere representing the Earth. I also salvaged some old code from a friend that would project a map of the Earth over the sphere, so we can see exactly where over … More Show You the World
Plotspace 
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