I'm very happy to be part of the team; especially because I've temporarily moved to Spain to work with other colleagues.

I was browsing the Global Trajectory Competition portal looking for some slides for work in the morning and came across a way of making XKCD-style images in Python. I used to love and use Python a lot, even for fun, anyway. But now it's even more fun!

This will correlate well with how much time I'll spend writing Python scripts for the hell of it.

If you want the source code that reproduces this plot it's on my GitHub. In the same repository you can get a high-res version of the plot (I can't believe I actually pay them to host this and can't seem to upload high-res images).

I felt I'd sparked a lot of interest with UoS3 (University of Southampton Small Satellite) that is a continuation of my final-year project, BLAST. Hopefully, with many more students that will be working on it next academic year and the increasing number of volunteers in the team we will have a lot more to report during next year's AMSAT-UK colloquium!

The colloquium itself was a fascinating event - it was great to see that building a satellite with a team of enthusiasts is perfectly achievable. And we were privileged (and absolutely astonished) to be able to see a live stream of telemetry from ISEE-3 that was being captured by AMSAT-DL team using the Bochum antenna! Simply mindblowing.

Myself, two lecturers and a fellow PhD student from the University of Southampton formed a mixed team with some lecturers from Politecnio di Milano to take part in the 7th Global Trajectory Optimisation Competition (GTOC). It's an annual event that gets together world-class specialists. We have a month (now much less...) to solve a very difficult global optimisation problem that has been set by the last year's winners, currently Universita di Roma "Sapienza". I must admit that they outdid themselves in finding what appears to be a simply unsolvable riddle. But I like challenges and spacecraft trajectory optimisation, so one way or another I'm happy to be participating.