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...

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...

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...

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...

I am currently working on the Rosalind Franklin rover, part of the Exomars 2022 mission to Mars. I develop a software layer to integrate the autonomous navigation algorithms (developed by CNES) with the hardware rover (built by Airbus). CNES has been working on image processing algorithms to give some autonomy to robots. Their expertise is being used, among other projects, in Exomars. Airbus is developing the actual rover, and has defined some APIs to be exposed to allow executing CNES’s algorithms. Read the 2831 words...

On 13th sept 2019, Pauline Acalin, a spaceflight photojournalist, posted two pictures of the Moon, taken 8.5 hours apart. Scott Manley commented “I should try measuring the distance to the Moon with this”. That’s was more than enough to get me started to attempt to do exactly this. After months of procrastination, here is finally an article with my findings and the detailed steps to reproduce them. “Rotating planets come in handy when you want to make a giant stereoscopic gif of the moon […]” - Pauline Acalin Introduction The size of the Earth will be assumed to be known. Read the 1199 words...

About 50 years ago, humans landed on the Moon for the first time. I initially wanted to write on this subject because I like rockets and space, but this anniversary is a nice coincidence. Going to the Moon is not an easy endeavor. It requires an outstanding number of subsystems and components to work flawlessly, and many maneuvers to execute right as planned. Each time a rocket takes off, an engineering miracle happens. Read the 4563 words...

This article is a little teasing on future articles that I might write. After two articles on Kubernetes, I am going to switch to aerospace themed articles. Nonetheless, they will probably be fairly focused on software. Since a few years, I am getting more interested in space. Of course, I watched Scott Manley’s videos, played KSP, etc. But nowadays I like to design missions or spacecrafts with back-of-the-envelope estimations, perform computations and simulations. Read the 298 words...