Welcome My little slice of the internet to talk about programming, space, and maybe a bit of myself Most recent posts {{ posts|limit:5 }} Who Am I? ...
I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field. The advice I heard early on, and that I watched a lot of other people follow, was to go into software. Machine learning, cloud infrastructure, web development. That's where the growth was, that's where the money…
The aerospace industry has been undergoing a boom. High resolution Earth Observation satellites and complex multi-instrument science spacecraft are more capable every generation. This, however, is creating a challenge that threatens the full potential of these missions: the growing gap between how much data we can generate and our ability to actually get it back to Earth. The Payload Revolution…
Last week, I wrote about hitting 11 million satellite propagations per second with SIMD vectorization in my Zig library astroz . That post got way more attention than I expected. But I ended that post by saying I was adding multithreading as the next component and knew it was going to be a new milestone for this project. The new number: 326 million propagations per second . To put that in…
Update: I've since added multithreading and pushed astroz to 326M propagations/sec . Read the follow-up → I've spent the past month optimizing SGP4 propagation and ended up with something interesting: astroz is now the fastest general purpose SGP4 implementation I'm aware of, hitting 11-13M propagations per second in native Zig and ~7M/s through Python with just pip install astroz . This post…
I have worked in the aerospace world for the past 8 years. In that time, I have picked up and worked on the some of the truly complex and precise pieces of software. However, something I really haven't been able to spend a ton of time on is the world of astrodynamics. I wanted to learn more about what went into orbit propagation and the mechanics of body to body transfers. The physics of making…