Space Research Fellowship - Currents of Space Collaboration

Our Mission:
Our engineers, with your help, will develop simulation software to support interplanetary space research, both cis-lunar and trans-lunar in scope. This includes software embedded in satellites to track dinosaur-killer asteroids, as well as targets for mining natural resources, etc. Technical Details follow, below.

MeetUp Agenda:
• The primary purpose of this meeting shall be to meet and greet our new members, and to discuss mission objectives.
• Following introductions, we will discuss the GMAT simulation system and associated tasks. Since this will be a working meeting, those with technical interests are requested to take the time to checkout GMAT (see links below) prior to the next meeting.
• Members with an interest in management are a bonus, as are members interested in developing funding, and are encouraged to join us.
• We shall discuss implementation of Python plugins for the NASA GMAT software, and crew allocation.
• We also need help in the creation of animations of the proposed mission operations. Specifically we need M.E. expertise to refine CAD models of the spacecraft, aerospace and astrodynamics expertise to optimize transfer orbits and trajectories, and software expertise in the simulation domain, specifically Python.

Technical Details:
We are using an existing NASA Open Source Orbital Trajectory Simulation System (GMAT) for our analysis. We will upgrade it as necessary.
This is an opportunity for professional coders as well as interns to extend their skill-sets to include aerospace engineering.

We will be meeting online via Zoom. If you have trouble linking, you can get the ZOOM URL by emailing to me here:
meetup@smallsats.net

Firstly: Our regular weekly meetings are Design Reviews. Each member describes their progress to date on the tasks assigned at the prior meeting. We then determine the next steps, and assign new tasks. If you join us, please expect to work on assignments between meetings.

Help Wanted:
Aerospace, Mechanical, and Astronautical engineers as well as Python Coders, Digital Artists, Software Engineers, and Machine Learning Developers are invited to join us along with other experienced engineers, scientists and technical managers to build and release a cutting edge aerospace open source software package.

The new simulation system will incrementally create animated visualizations and demo simulations for crowdfunding and user education.

Objective:
Subsequent phases will include the construction and launch of the spacecraft swarm we are simulating today.

About GMAT:
We have identified an open source orbital trajectory system, the NASA General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT), for our space flight simulation and visualization. The package is free, open source, accurate, and tutorial videos are available on YouTube. We will be adding Python apps which we can discuss in upcoming meetings.

I recommend that interested participants examine the wealth of online documentation. You can also download and install the binaries, and follow the video tutorials. Executable binaries, source and documentation are available from SourceForge (NASA GMAT)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/files/
and here:
https://gmat.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/GW/overview

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