Catching asteroids and tracking satellites with Python

About this talk

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 orbit-predictor, a Python library to track Earth-orbiting artificial satellites open sourced this year by Satellogic, and poliastro, a community developed, open source Python library for interplanetary orbit computation 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.