I am about to begin a PhD in astronomy. Until last month I was working at Caltech for 3 years on code which calculates orbits of asteroids to high precision. This code is being used on several NASA telescopes now to predict when they will image known asteroids (NEO Surveyor, SphereX, maybe Roman eventually). I was allowed to open source it and I am planning on making it the basis of my PhD research:
It can predict the location of the entire catalog of known asteroids to generally within the uncertainty of our knowledge of the orbits. Its core is written in rust, with a python frontend.
I've never really dabbled in youtube. I have several projects/papers I am working on using this code, I have thought about writing some blog posts as I publish those. But a PhD is going to be a major time sink, we will see what happens.
Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately the PhD has already sunk its claws in. I should have some flashy stuff to show off in a 2-3 months (I have a conference talk coming I have to prepare material for).
I like the daredevil asteroids going for the close dive of the star emoji sun :)
Would it be appropriate to communicate on the README which telescopes this is used for? You see these very niche, very professional-looking repositories on GitHub now and then, and it's never clear how much credibility they have and whether they come from a hobbyist, student, experiment, or are in operational use.
I have a background in physics and ~20 years as a software engineer in the tech industry. Astronomy and astrophysics are so reliant on code these days; is there anywhere I could volunteer my expertise just to be a code monkey and help teams be more productive when working on software?
https://github.com/dahlend/kete
It can predict the location of the entire catalog of known asteroids to generally within the uncertainty of our knowledge of the orbits. Its core is written in rust, with a python frontend.