What I'm working on
And, what I got done in Q4 2022
Hey! It’s been 6 months since we last talked so I wanted to share a quick update.
In January I joined a research lab at the Olin College of Engineering and I’ve been:
Co-developing a (future) open source python/R package analyzing application information from every satellite filing submitted to the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) over the past 20 years. My team’s intention is to understand filing trends from specific companies and organizations to see patterns for how filings for specific satellites have changed. For example, NGSO (non geo-stationary) satellites like Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon Kupier are deploying exceptionally fast (10s per week) while GSO (geo-stationary satellites) satellites have experienced a deployment decline. Our analysis will help answer questions about why, what companies are deploying the most and where these satellites are located, etc.
Working with a few Stanford Grad students in aerospace engineering to propose a solution to prevent satellite mission failure using data trusts (a third party that holds data on behalf of all companies). One of the root causes of mission failure is companies don’t want to share their mission data out of fear of compromising their competitive advantage. But, without sharing data, it’s difficult to detect anomalies and verify why mission failure is happening. Our hypothesis is that a data trust is an optimal model to solve this problem because it acts like a GitHub for mission failure where each company can see each other’s history, run a data log to understand how data was used, and track requests other companies are making. Space is a positive sum game too. If every company has successful launches, it means less regulatory crackdown or customer losses. Data trusts have been implemented in the real world once and failed. They’re in a few European pilots but the idea is new. We’re talking to people in both data and space now to get validation on whether this works.
Helping debug software and place antenna/hardware parts of a satellite ground station on the roof of Olin College so we can complete a successful satellite launch in the fall of 2024.
The end state of the first two projects includes research papers and presentations at conferences later this year. The third project, on a longer timeline, includes a successful orbit of a satellite our team, in partnership with 6 other colleges, builds.
My coursework this semester has been rewardingly difficult. I enjoy it because it’s hard and I feel like a sailor conquering a new, unexplored territory each week.
In my EE course I recently built a heart monitor with two chips and band pass filters. In my CS course I simulated both a Finite state machine and a Turing machine. In my satellite systems class I’ve been learning about link budgets and writing public notes about the class’ weekly fireside chats with space executives. And in my data science course I’m trying to validate my hypothesis that the acquisition of datasets is to the 2020s/2030s what the acquisition of companies was to the 2000s/2010s.
If you’re curious about what I did last fall, I mostly wrote essays and built product. You can explore them both on my website.
An ask: I’m looking for a summer position in data science/product/space tech. If you know anyone that’s hiring and wouldn’t mind making an intro, send me a note!
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zp