Juan Luis Cano: "Catch that asteroid with poliastro!"
Catch that asteroid with poliastro!
The use of Python for Astronomy has been rising in the last few years, and now there are more and more applications for Aerospace as well. In this talk we will describe poliastro, a community developed, open source Python library for orbital mechanics and interactive visualization. The development of these libraries posed several interesting challenges aside from the algorithms themselves, such as the need of careful validation against external data from NASA and other sources, acceleration of some core parts using numba to replace FORTRAN code, and thoughtful design of the API to simplify physical unit and astronomical time scales handling on the user side. We will discuss the impact of these challenges on the development, highlight the strengths and limitations of Python for these specific applications and, of course, show some cool pictures of rockets.
Juan Luis Cano
Barcelona. Spain
Software Engineer
Satellogic
Chair of the Spanish branch of the PSF, Aerospace engineer, open source software advocate, European citizen, urban cyclist, '70s hard rock lover, frustrated musician, human being. Obsessed with pursuing impossible dreams and democratizing the access to knowledge.