In 2019 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz received the Nobel Prize for their 1995 discovery of an exoplanet, which is just a planet orbiting about a start that isn’t our sun. Since then, exoplanet discovery has boomed with us now knowing of over 4000 different exoplanets. Most of these exoplanets, and their corresponding data, are…
A while ago I set up SpaceBot, a twitter bot designed to post about space. In the meantime, I’ve rolled out some upgrades to it. Here they are, What Happened in Deep Space Today By looking at Jonathan McDowell’s deep space catalog, SpaceBot now posts a random event that happened that day in deep space…
Introduction NOTE: This is a very graphics-heavy post and may take some time to load. Lagrange points are those points in the three-body system where the tug of gravity from the two primary bodies cancel out and any spacecraft stays in the same relative position with the two primary bodies. If you are in the rotating…
What is Optimal Control? Lots of problems we encounter in the real world can be boiled down to “what is the best way to get from point A to Point B while minimizing a certain cost”. For a quadcopter, it’s how can I stay in my location while minimizing my battery usage. For a spacecraft,…
Intro Last year we had a 2 part series on how to land on the moon using a suicide burn. There, the condition was that we could only turn on the engine once, and it had to be fully throttled. But most landers can control their thrust, so in this post we’re going to go…
Once you derive the equations of motion for a system, the next step in simulating it numerically is to compute the state-space representation, the backbone of modern contorl theroy. This is useful because by placing the equations of motion in a common format we can apply a whole host of techniques to study the system.…
Does your Twitter feed not have enough space in it? Introducing Space Bot A new twitter bot dedicated to all things space. What Space Bot Does So Far Plots ground tracks for random objects in space Shows the two objects likeliest to collied that day, as well as when their closest approach will be. Note:…
Whenever I made plots for my work on neural networks, they were always flat and boring. Then, a few weeks ago, I had an idea for visualizing a neural network “thinking” through a problem as it was solving it. Using my work on artificial intelligence to control interplanetary trajectories, I created up the following gif.…
A few month’s ago Primer, a great youtube channel that you should check out, posted the following question on Twitter Before I go over my thinking and then show some numerical simulations, take a moment and think it over. If you’ve already got the answer you can check out other numerical probability puzzles here. My…
Last week in my lab’s journal club I was presenting on two white papers detailing the reasoning for possible missions to explore the outer solar system. These papers are part of the Astro2020 decadal survey, and I figured I would share some thoughts on them here. As both papers are short (<10 pages each) and…
