Lots of travel

It’s been a whirlwind few months. I’ve crossed more timezones than I care to remember, traversed more kilometers than I can count, and seen more places than I can remember at the moment.

I attended the “New Trends in Astrodynamics VI” conference at the Courant Institute of Mathematics, NYU, New York City, where I gave a presentation on the Tudat concept. The talk was well received and there was genuine interest in what we’re doing at A&S. Hopefully, over the course of the next year, we will be able to release an open-source version of the software to the general public.

After the conference in New York, I took a 5-week trip to India, to visit extended family. It was great being back in both Mumbai and Bangalore and spending time with family. I continued working on Tudat code during my trip, with an eye to the fact that I’m still hoping to have a journal paper about the orbital motion of Mab submitted prior to the DPS-EPSC meeting in Nantes, France in October.

After my trip to India I had the priveledge to participate in NASA’s Planetary Science Summer School program, hosted at JPL in Pasadena. I learned a lot during the week about the mission design process. We came up with a rather successful concept-level design of a Venus lander mission. The hope is that we’ll be able to present the results of our summer school at a few conferences.

Now I’m back in Delft for the month of August. I’m busy preparing the next internal release of Tudat, which is scheduled for the end of the month. I’ve got a bit more coding and code-checking to do. Additionally, I have to start running simulations for my Mab paper soon. Given that there are now only 8 weeks before DPS-EPSC 2011, time is of the essence, and so hopefully in another week or two I will have my first results. At that time, further updates will follow here.