This article is a transcript of my talk "Launch Windows - How is Matthias Maurer going to join Thomas Pesquet's Halloween party?" given on the 2021-11-03 at PTS on our weekly "PTS lunch & learn" event. The source of the slides are available on my Github. Introduction NASA’s Crew-3 Mission The leftmost person is Matthias Maurer. He is a German astronaut, and joined the ESA astronaut corp in 2015. Read the 1694 words...

I don’t really have a bucket list, but I do have a list of things I want to do: I keep a short list of things to focus on and make progress. I review and update this list yearly or so. Since some time, I have been thinking about running a marathon, and this item has finally made it to this year’s focus list. After reading a couple training plans, I prepared my own, fitting my schedule and time commitment. Read the 731 words...

The goal of my Moon lander guidance software series is to learn and gain some experience with an end-to-end aerospace software project, especially on the topic of GNC. I have already written a few articles sharing my findings: for instance, this one about guidance. Today I want to talk about control. I will use the engine gimbal controller of my Moon lander1 project to explain how to design, tune and validate a PID controller. Read the 2049 words...

Software is complicated: ensuring that old features keep working, while holding the bugs away, is an every day’s fight. Thankfully, there are many (too often unknown) gems, either built in the language/compiler or as third-party libraries. Some time ago, I introduced SymPy, which allows one to use symbolic maths in Python, and do things such as solving equations or integrating functions. In this article, I will introduce you another nice library, for Rust this time: uom (units of measurement). Read the 1129 words...

After finishing my studies in France, I wanted to enjoy the possibility of traveling and working in 26 countries without passport or laborious paperwork. The aerospace industry in France is also very international, and I consider it an asset to have lived in different countries and be able to speak various languages. Flag of Europe - Wikipedia, Public domain For these reasons, I searched outside France for my first job, and was able to get a job in Madrid, Spain. Read the 1418 words...

As part of my Moon lander guidance software, I am making several small prototypes for each subsystems, in order to test ideas, learn and choose the best option. While I progress on the overall project, I have already learned a lot of things and wanted to share some of them. In this article, I will talk about how to control the altitude and vertical velocity of a spacecraft in order to guide it to a soft landing. Read the 3922 words...

While working on my Moon lander guidance software, I am making several small prototypes to test ideas. One of them involves testing several control laws (of the acceleration), which implies quite a lot of manual calculations (to integrate to obtain the velocity and position). Doing these calculations by hand is tedious and error prone, and I thought about using a symbolic math program. Usually, a programming language can not manipulate variables without predefined values, but I found a Python library which can: SymPy. Read the 2028 words...

While working on Exomars as a software engineer, I was notified an issue to fix. I thought it was an interesting one, and spent some moments to think about how it could have been prevented in the first place. I care about code quality, and always try to build reliable software. For this purpose, I do not believe in rockstar developers (we are all fallible humans), but rather in (automatically enforced) processes and tools. Read the 1135 words...

I have always struggled during my control theory classes, and almost failed one (out of the three I attended). With this history, some people would have developed a hatred for this subject, but I personally felt in love with it: I have always found it magical to be able to control physical things with software. I love making a pile of silicon1 do things by itself, and developing control algorithms makes it possible to build robots and other automated machines. Read the 2525 words...

For the second part of my Rust & WebAssembly journey, I will write a basic hello world project. Note: you can jump to the demo by clicking here. This will give me the opportunity to demonstrate how to write a simple Wasm module in Rust. I will focus on a simple frontend and ignore the backend: no complicated GET or POST requests, no websockets, etc. This article will present how to build a simple game, such as Matt’s Pont. Read the 3047 words...