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Researching Satellites in California

By April 28, 2018March 4th, 2019No Comments

Just arrived in San Francisco 🙂

Sunday I’m going to San Luis Obispo, home of CalPoly, where the 15th Cubesat Developers Workshop will take place. This workshop has played an important role in the recent history of nano- satellites. It’s mainly here where the Cubesat standard and the corresponding mechanism for the launch of those tiny satellites into space, invented by Jordi Puig-Suari (CalPoly) and Bob Twiggs (Stanford and then Morehead), has been discussed and elaborated over the years.

I’ve also brought something to present: it’s been quite a few months that I’ve been collaborating with Nikitas Chronas (Delft) and Apostolos Masiakos (Athens) to analyze the software they developed for the UPSat satellite (which is, by the way, orbiting the Earth). Before that, I’ve been studying the UPSat for several months, when I came into a part of the code that was worth further attention…

Long story short, we conceptualized with Nikitas and Apostolos a way to miniaturize satellites. Comparing their code with one of the space industry standards, we came up with three (conceptual) operations allowing to pass from the “normal” to the “nano” scale.

This collaboration is part of a wider study I begun as a side-project. That said, I’m glad that my school ISC Paris, supported me on that 🙂

I’ll be in California until May 7th then I’ll go back to Europe.

If you’re nearby ping me for a coffee.

Update (30/4): initially retained as an “alternate presentation”, our poster didn’t finally make it to the programme. There’s a very wide participation here and many interesting presentations, many of which are by NASA engineers.

Update 2 (30/4): turns out, I’ll be presenting on Wednesday, May 2nd, from 1:45 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.