Rewriting space mission analysis in Rust

By Helge Eichhorn

Talk - Thursday, 18 September
11:45

Imagine you are a few months into a project for the European Space Agency, finally about to start the implementation of the software, and suddenly one of your main open source dependencies drops off the radar. Would you pick the reasonable option and choose an existing library? Or would you pick the unreasonable option and rewrite it in Rust? This happened to us with our main astrodynamics engine and as the title of this talk already gives away, we chose the unreasonable option.

In this talk, we want to share our experiences: why we chose Rust over other programming languages for implementing the astrodynamics kernel of our satellite constellation mission analysis system, and whether we would do it again.

Speaker

Helge Eichhorn

Helge Eichhorn is a core contributor within the Libre Space Foundation and the technical lead for the Ephemerista Satellite Constellation Simulator and the Lox astrodynamics framework. He is also a mechanical engineer who has gone off the rails into software development with more than a decade of experience in software engineering projects in and outside of the European aerospace industry.