I gave a talk that was bridging the gap between what the debris modelling community, which I am a part of now, does and what the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) people do. I also suggested that perhaps Active Debris Removal is not mandatory unlike what most people think. It was generally very well received, felt a lot better too, and I even got invited to another conference organised by the NASA Orbital Debris Office.

So, in general, all very good. Besides, just how great it is that the best, solely from the technical point of view, conference I could attend is on Maui?

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.

I had the pleasure to participate in the bi-annual workshop organised by the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES, the French national space agency) that took place in Paris. It was extremely interesting to get together with the world-leading researchers in the same field, some of whom I met for the very first time.

What made the entire experience even more exciting was the fact that I gave a 20-minute talk. I'd given a talk to similarly-sized audience (circa 150 people) once before, but this time most of the listeners knew more about the general subject more than myself. But I always enjoy being in the spotlight, so that was reasonably enjoyable even.

Even though this was my very-first conference talk I was reasonably content with the outcome. And got some very useful comments and feedback that I am sure will greatly help me in my research, which was one of the primary reasons why I wanted to give a talk so early-on in the doctorate.

If you're interested here's the presentation that I gave - it's generally about a proposed method to try and pro-actively deal with the space debris problem to try and save money while getting the most out of it.

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.

I do believe I've reached a point where I can commit to updating this website regularly, so here it goes. I officially promise to keep this site up to date from now on. I'm not sure how often I can do it or how often I will have something to write about, though.

Since, for now, this website as a whole is generally intended to spread the word about my research this blog will generally be about that. This focus may evolve over time depending on how my career and life in general change, though. Or I may simply feel like writing about something specific (which will most likely have to do with Space, given my interests).