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How Accurate Should Your Satellite Sensors Be?

A Practical Look at Pointing Errors and Mission Tolerance.
ADCS
sensors

An intuitive, back-of-the-envelope guide connecting sensor accuracy, and ground resolution.

Oct 30, 2025
Madhukara Putty
 

How Satellites Sense Their Orientation: The Geometry Behind Attitude Determination

From Sun sensors to star trackers — how spacecraft turn raw measurements into a sense of direction.
ADCS
sensors
A satellite that knows where it is but not where it’s facing is almost as helpless as one that’s lost in orbit. Orientation — or attitude, in spacecraft terms — determines…
Oct 22, 2025
Madhukara Putty
 

How Satellites Know Which Way They’re Pointing: Inside ADCS Sensors

An overview of satellite attitude sensors, their principles, and performance.
ADCS
A satellite that knows where it is but not which way it’s facing is half-blind. It can’t aim its antenna, orient its solar panels, or point its camera at Earth. That’s why…
Oct 19, 2025
Madhukara S Putty
 

Common Python Errors in Space Software — and How to Handle Them

scientific computing

In scientific programming, and especially in space systems, we don’t just write code that “works.” We write code that fails safely and predictably.

Oct 5, 2025
Madhukara Putty

A Python class for computing classical orbital elements

orbital mechanics
scientific computing

This post walks through computing COEs from state vectors in Python using NumPy.

Sep 29, 2025
Madhukara Putty
 

How AI will Redfine Human Roles in Space Software

Thoughts

In the AI era, the “default engineer” in space will not be someone confined to one subsystem, but someone capable of thinking across the entire satellite.

Sep 20, 2025
Madhukara Putty
 

What the Radius–Velocity Angle Reveals About Orbit Direction

A geometric shortcut for interpreting orbital motion.
orbital mechanics

A geometric look at how the dot product of radius and velocity vectors reveals whether a satellite is moving toward or away from perigee.

Aug 23, 2025
Madhukara Putty
 

Visualizing Orbits with Poliastro — A Detailed Walkthrough

orbital mechanics
poliastro

A detailed guide to plotting orbits using Python

Aug 15, 2025
Madhukara Putty
 

Visualizing Orbits with Poliastro – Part 1: Creating Orbit Objects

Learn how to create circular and elliptical orbit objects in Python using Poliastro.
orbital mechanics
scientific computing
poliastro

Learn how to create orbit objects in Poliastro using classical elements and state vectors — with beginner-friendly explanations of key concepts like epochs and astronomical units.

Jun 29, 2025
Madhukara S Putty
 

Automating a Scientific Python Setup: A Gentle Walkthrough

A shell script to set up poliastro and its dependencies
orbital mechanics
scientific computing
poliastro
shell scripts

The first in a series of posts on poliastro – a Python library for visualizing and analyzing orbits in Python.

Jun 25, 2025
Madhukara S Putty
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