Author: roshan
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Solar Descent
Sunset? This may seem like its a post and picture not related to space, but the sun is, in fact, in space. And when it sets, its really just the Earth rotating away from it as the Earth orbits around the sun. So clearly, this post is also about space, and the sanctity of this…
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Fresh Milky Way
Land of the rising galaxy After last year’s successful (by my amateur standards) Milky Way sighting, I knew I had to go back in 2021 to capture more Milky Way shots and improve my technique. We returned to the Sunrise Visitor’s center at Mt. Rainier national park on a brisk September night. With clear weather,…
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Galaxy Photo Quest
Approach I’ve wanted to go stargazing for a while. Seeing a pure night sky, untouched by city lights or pollution, along with the Milky Way, has been on my to-do list for years. We decided to make the trip now, before summer ends and while skies are still clear. The location for our stargazing journey…
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Seeking NEOWISE
Approach Of the many things to happen in 2020, the passing of Comet NEOWISE may have seemed small, or distant (to be fair, the comet was distant – about 100 million kilometers, or 100 gigameters, away from Earth). This once in a 6700 year event was over before I knew it, but luckily I was…
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Mapping it out
Charting a course After moving cross country and starting a new job, I’ve finally settled down enough to make some more progress on my python simulations (thanks to having a long weekend without traveling). I’m moving on to setting up a Python lander simulation with some Martian terrain. I’d like to mess around with some…
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Getting snake-y
One of the disadvantages of being out of college is your free MATLAB subscription goes away. As a result, I’m making the switch to Python. Besides consistently being off-by-one due to zero indexing, I like Python quite a bit. Getting a 4th order RK solver to work was about as intuitive as getting ode45 to…
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Learning to land
As part of my Master’s degree, I took a Robotics independent study class in my last semester. After 4 years of undergrad and one semester of grad school, I finally got to explore my own completely independent project over the course of a 3 month semester (this was all in early 2017, I’m just getting…
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Titan Entry, Descent, & Landing
Background My senior design course involved creating a baseline design for a mission to Titan, Saturn’s most well-known moon. We picked Titan because it has amazing potential for breakthrough discoveries from both a planetary science and astrobiology perspective. This is largely due to the methane atmosphere and carbon rich environment. A methane atmosphere means a “methane…
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Orbits with Attitude
Been a while, I know. November was brutal. Somehow I have more work despite fewer credits. Built some CubeSat reaction wheels though, which was pretty cool. Also managed to fix up the simulation software a bit more. I added real orbital dynamics this time around. Previously I had been propagating the time from the simulation…
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Solar Sightseeing & Science (in 4k)
Earlier this week, the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory posted this video of the sun observed through multiple wavelengths in ultra HD (4k). This is a pretty amazing view of the sun. Making observations in different wavelengths allows astrophysicists to view different behaviors on the sun’s surface, and allows them to “filter” out certain behaviors so they can…
Roshan Radhakrishnan 