https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChEuA1AUJAY
I'd like to understand if there is a way to contribute to space missions like these, or space research in general, as a "civilian" software developer. Is there perhaps a community of space enthusiasts working on domain-specific open source tools? What are some unsolved problems in this field?
All of the Nyx tools are I have Rust with a Python interface. We used the Python interface throughout the flight dynamics on the mission.
https://gitlab.com/librespacefoundation/satnogs
There's over 600 open issues with everything from hardware to website UX, so depending on your field there may be a lot you can contribute.
It's used by a few start ups and I'm hoping to spread the word a bit more once I get some time to clean some things up. Astrodynamics sorely lacks a great open source ecosystem. Poliastro was great but is now unmaintained.
There's Orekit (which is fantastic) but it's in Java which makes it difficult to scale across languages or stacks.
Nyx Space is excellent, and it's focused on deep space applications.
Contributing to any of these tools would be a great way to improve the open source community in astrodynamics!
In any case, you must understand, even on warmest times, space technologies considered as semi-weapons, so if you cannot achieve military clearance, you will have access only to some niches.
If niches are not scary for you, excellent, there are plenty opportunities.
First, in many countries exist large niche of high altitude air research, for which constantly need small cheap rockets and balloons, and all of these need reliable organizations, who will do regular starts and than find all things returned from near space.
So, what I mean - great deal of space work is just find and gather all parts fallen from missions.
Sure, all that things mean, better to make reliable control system, and reliable return system, than to literally looking for needle at haystack sized about hundred kilometers. But unfortunately, even best real rockets have failure rate ~0.4..0.7% (amateurs usually considered good to achieve 10..20% fr), so for every 100 starts, could have 1 failure for professional approach, or 10..20 for amateur, and will work on field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Sky
Problems near infinite, because even amateur rockets are not cheap, and in many cases civilian equipment are not working (yes, civilian GPS are just turning off or hanging if achieve military bounds for altitude or speed, so need to make your own navigation) and all additional weight subtract from profit, and any failure also could be fatal for economy, so there constantly appear new brave people and on other side, appear disappointed, who leave to more calm industries.
But as others pointed out, there are a lot of civil space companies needing embedded systems programmers to work on space subsystems and (generally student lead) open source CubeSat tech. You'd likely need an actual job to work on solving novel hardware-specific problems like autonomous navigation, docking, landing, robotics, advanced Space Domain Awareness etc
Particularly when it comes to code generation it has, IMO, a big advantage over FF and especially over STK. It's relatively lightweight, at least in my experience it's much faster to spawn and destroy instances than FreeFlyer, and it's pretty simple to write code to leverage GMAT to do interesting things.
Two things I've used GMAT for that would have taken longer in FF or STK are generating thousands of randomized ephemerides with keplerian parameters distributed in a set range, and automating a Monte Carlo-esque analysis focusing on error magnitude permutations by generating GMAT code from templates and collating into a single script file.
Not to mention it's free; STK and FF are very much not.
I'm on a first name basis with a chunk of the GMAT development team, though it's been a minute and I don't know how they're faring given recent political changes - they were out of Goddard which was having issues even before this January.
I don't know how often they accept code from the public, but I know they appreciate bug reports.
Anyways I guess I just wanted to go on about GMAT a little. It's a really cool tool and it's awesome that it's free. I wish it had more industry adoption.
Well, there's plenty of civilian space companies these days! It's largely embedded-oriented (code that controls launch vehicles and satellites) from what I've seen, but the opportunities are there.
Hope this one goes differently to my landings in Kerbal Space Program.
From the wiki I read that this is a part of the Artemis program, but the connection seems unclear to me. Could anybody explain, will this be used to deliver just cargo or will it have people aboard sometime in the future?
(Edit: riffraff on th thread has the correct lede!)
Space Shuttle: bang
Space Shuttle: No. *bang*
In my opinion, the most effective strategy is to fly full speed at the moon, crashing headlong into it before it realizes you’re there and can run away.
I never imagined that geolocation systems could work outside of the earth.
I also have a theory this might work because at any given point in time, some of the gps satellites while moving at their orbital altitudes might be emitting signals aimed somewhat more directly towards the moon, at least for short periods of time.
"The use of GPS signals for spacecraft navigation has increased in general over the last few decades. Navigation employing GPS observations for spacecraft in low-Earth orbit is now considered routine.
"However, the situation is quite different for spacecraft that fly in the Space Service Volume above the GPS constellation, including medium-Earth orbit (MEO), geostationary orbit (GEO) and high-Earth orbit (HEO) satellites, as well as missions to the Moon and beyond.
"For these spacecraft, reception of GPS transmit antenna side lobe signals is essential to improve availability and performance of on-board navigation and timing. In this context, the knowledge of the full antenna pattern (main lobe and side lobes) from the transmitting antennas of each of the GPS satellites is essential."
So the signal is strongest between GPS satellite and the Earth, but the beam doesn't have sharp edges and enough of it misses the earth to be useful in higher orbits, even above the GPS constellation..
Something orbiting at 550 km is approx 0.027 of the total orbital altitude of a 20,200 km orbit NAVSTAR series GPS satellite.
https://www.gpsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Improved...
As such, successive GPS satellite antenna designs have been refined to reduce sidelobes, just as deep-space operators have realised they could be useful.
TLDR: sidelobes aren't like gentle feathering at the edges of a beam, they're more like petals of a daisy.
I've always been annoyed when I see words like moonquake or marsquake, like earthquake is used for the planet and not for the dearth under your feet.
IMHO, creating neologism for the sake of neologism creates the burden to parse them instead of adding additional clarity.
Earthquake to marsquake is going from an inclusive term to a specific term of dubious utility.
Geolocation on other worlds is a misnomer and could be replaced by a more inclusive term.
I leave as an exercise to the reader the burden and value of any such change.
https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896125390386606333
Apologies for the X link. Can someone convert?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250302091628/https://pbs.twimg...
