What I’m Working On

It’s been a little while since I wrote the first entry here, so I figured this was a good time for an update.

When I originally launched this website, most of my attention was on simply getting it built. I wanted somewhere I could collect my projects, work, and thoughts without reducing everything to a few lines on a résumé or LinkedIn profile. I’m also pretty averse to posting frequent updates on sites like LinkedIn because of the somewhat robotic formalities that tend to come with them. Since I built this site myself, I get to put a little more of my own personality into it.

Since then, the site itself has been relatively quiet, but the work I’ve been committing to behind it has not.

A lot of my time recently has gone toward revisiting older college projects and turning them into something more complete and reproducible. That has meant cleaning up code, adding tests, improving documentation, creating dedicated GitHub repositories, and questioning assumptions I made the first time around. Overall, I’m trying to hold my own work to a higher standard.

My biggest ongoing project is still the Orbital Intelligence Dashboard.

It started as an idea for visualizing satellite orbits, but I quickly felt that was too general for a web-based project. So I expanded it into a broader experiment in space-domain analysis. Right now, the project combines SGP4 propagation, orbital geometry, ground tracks, ground-station access calculations, historical element analysis, and a Three.js interface.

One thing I’ve become increasingly aware of while building it is the distinction between displaying information and communicating what that information actually means.

Orbital data can look remarkably authoritative on a polished interface even when the underlying data is old, coordinate frames are easily misunderstood, or the analysis supports a much weaker conclusion than the visualization implies. Because of that, I’ve been deliberately trying to make assumptions, reference frames, source dates, and other limitations visible rather than hiding them behind the interface.

Following that same philosophy, I’ve been applying it to some of my older projects as well.

I’ve revisited my orbital mechanics and CR3BP work from college. Instead of simply publishing the original notebooks, I’ve restructured them into more reproducible projects with clearer numerical validation, documentation, and tests.

Now onto physical things.

I’ve been assembling the hardware for a small satellite-oriented electronics project built around an ESP32. The scope is still evolving, but one of my goals is to connect some of the software work I’ve been doing (e.g. the dashboard) to sensors, hardware, communications, and physical interfaces involved in tracking and sensing satellites across the sky.

That will probably be one of the more experimental projects documented here.

More broadly, this period after graduating has given me an opportunity to explore where I want to take my background. My interests continue to pull me toward spacecraft and orbital mechanics, and I’m trying to learn more about problems involving sensing, simulation, and the challenges that come with operating systems in space.

As for the Notes section itself, I want it to become less of a traditional blog and more of an engineering notebook.

Some notes will be project updates. Others may be explanations of technical concepts I’m learning, analyses of spacecraft or missions, or simply records of problems that took longer to understand than I expected.

I also want to keep improving the website itself. There are several features and design ideas I have in store, but I’d rather let the site grow alongside the work than try to design some imaginary “final version” all at once.

For now, my priorities are fairly simple:

build things, understand them properly, document what I learn, and keep improving the standard of the work that ends up here.

There should be considerably more to show soon.

Peace out until next time!

— Peter