Professional Life
Growing as an Engineer Post-Grad
After graduating from MIT in 2021 with Bachelors Degree in Aerospace Engineering, a minor in Computer Science, and an Acting HASS (Humanities Arts and Social Science) concentration, I moved to LA
to work at the Aerospace Corporation. Here, I found myself at home in the Cooperative Autonomous Vehicle Ecosystem Laboratory (CAVE Lab), where I spent most of my working hours programming robotics
hardware to reflect satellite space flight to enable myself and my team to develop hardware and software to support Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO), In-orbit Servicing and Manufacturing (ISAM), and Space Mobility and Logistics (SM&L).
Flight hardware in the CAVE Lab from Aerospace's Slingshot 1
Working on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms in the lab has been a core part of my experience at Aerospace. Here I'm shown working on a computer vision payload from
Aerospace's Slingshot 1 Modular Cubesat, which used a gimbaled miniature satellite to train a computer vision model for pose-estimation of spacecraft, as well as generate data for
public distribution. While I didn't develop directly
These fields of space vehicle mission operations all involve close-proximity (1-10 meter) satellite maneuvers, which require high precision and autonomous control due to telemetry delays in control signals from the ground.
In the space industry, there is currently a large market to apply AI, ML, RL, Computer Vision, and other modern software technologies to these problems to place trustworthy autonomous agents in orbit.
My work in the CAVE Lab has furthered almost every aspect of our ability to test these software and hardware tools on the ground before sending them into space, which has a plethora of benefits for companies and researchers hoping to fly vehicles in the aforementioned mission areas.
New Skills
As an engineer that never stopped trying to drink out of the firehose, I have gained quite an interesting assortment of new skills since graduating that I would not have envisioned myself ever working with:
- Linux Server Administration
- Network Administration and Security
- Proposal and Technical Report Writing
- Kubernetes and Docker Development
- Programming in Rust
- Project and Lab Management