The Activity
The project aims to design and develop an open-source satellite mission and communications analysis simulation tool. This tool addresses the industry’s main pain points and attempts to tackle them efficiently. The simulator is designed following the Agile Development methodology, aiming to create a set of core functionalities that turn this tool into a competitive product. In addition, for the needs of this project and to facilitate a better user support experience, a detailed user guide will be compiled, and a series of video tutorials will be released to provide users with informative training sessions. Once the tool is ready, the reaching out and dissemination part will be initiated. This includes promoting the tool to different online platforms, creating and running an online community dedicated to the tool, and generating a list of potential users who could become the community’s first members.
Benefits
There are some significant advantages to using the Ephemerista simulator. More specifically, Ephemerista:
- boasts a cross-platform design with a web-based interface. This eliminates compatibility concerns, allowing users on any operating system to leverage its functionalities.
- embraces a dynamic development approach. New modules and functionalities are continuously integrated, ensuring users always have access to the latest advancements.
- fosters a vibrant community. Users can access public simulations and data shared by others, enabling seamless collaboration, knowledge exchange, and the ability to build upon existing work.
- adheres to the “Controlled Ecosystem” model. While core functionalities remain open-source, a paid hosted service provides financial backing for ongoing development and system maintenance, ensuring long-term project sustainability.
- is scalable and resource-efficient as its hosted application is designed for scalability. Through infrastructure optimization, the system can adapt to user demand, guaranteeing seamless operation regardless of project complexity. Additionally, by offloading computationally intensive tasks, Ephemerista minimizes resource requirements on user machines, allowing users to focus on analysis without hardware limitations.
Features
Ephemerista is built to cater to the industry’s diverse needs with the user in mind. Some of the main features and functionalities of Ephemerista include:
- The Propagator unifies various open-source astrodynamics libraries and allows users to leverage both semi-analytical and numerical methods for precise orbit calculations.
- The Event Detector is proactive and insightful, identifying critical mission events during the simulation.
- The RF Simulator is a vital module that calculates link budgets for all potential point-to-point communications, ensuring optimal signal strength.
- The Communications and Navigation Analyser: Building upon link budgets and the constellation’s state, it delivers end-to-end communication and GNSS performance metrics.
- The Constellation Optimiser: This component combines data from all other modules to perform multi-objective optimization using cutting-edge genetic or AI algorithms, ensuring mission success.
Ephemerista offers a fully scriptable Python API for advanced automation and a user-friendly web-based GUI. This intuitive interface, built with React.js, allows for convenient parameter configuration and even features 3D visualization capabilities for a truly immersive experience.
Community
The project’s success is integral to fostering a collaborative and engaging community around Ephemerista. Adhering to open-source methodologies, transparency, and openness are significant, so the project will have everything fully public and documented. This approach fosters early outreach activities and supports collaboration with developers and potential users. Ephemerista will cultivate a collaborative ecosystem to fuel its ongoing development by proactively identifying and integrating key contributors. This focus on community will strengthen the project’s commercialization strategy. Furthermore, the Ephemerista Community will foster inclusivity, creating the appropriate conditions for different entities to join and addressing the mission needs of the industry. This will ensure a diverse and engaged user base, promoting continuous contribution and widespread adoption of the Ephemerista simulator.
Sign up into the Libre Space Foundation Community Forum and join the Ephemerista dedicated space.
Libre Space Foundation
LSF is fully committed to open-source, open-data and open-development methodologies. All our projects are open-source and available to the public at the LSF GitLab account. This is a commitment that we keep, adhering to the principles of the LSF manifesto. This enables us to create, maintain and foster a sizeable open-source ecosystem from which many open-source projects about space have sprung. From SatNOGS (an open-source network of over 400 satellite ground stations in more than 50 countries in the world) to the world’s first-ever open-source CubeSat (UPSat) and the first-ever PocketQube Deployer, the PICOBUS. Overall, LSF has been working hard to promote, establish and enhance scientific research and knowledge about space, bringing space closer to the public with all the projects it participates in. For this, throughout the years, LSF has established great collaborations with Space Agencies, Companies, Universities and communities from around the world. Creating and maintaining an ecosystem of space-related synergies, knowledge, technology and scientific research.