My time at:
Intelligence and Space Internship: (June 2021 - August 2021)
The summer after my senior year, I did an internship as a Guidance, Navigation, and Controls engineer in Raytheon's Intelligence and Space Division. When I worked there, the merger with United Technologies Corporation hadn't yet finalized, and the rebrand to "RTX" was still on the horizon.
I found this opportunity through my girlfriend at the time, who was family friends with the I&S Division's Chief of Staff. Never underestimate the power (and necessity) of networking!
My time was dedicated to developing orbit determination code for NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System 2 (JPSS-2). I also spent a good deal of time liaising with the customer, refining their requirements and elucidating how my team's work would satisfy them.
The summer after my senior year, I did an internship as a Guidance, Navigation, and Controls engineer in Raytheon's Intelligence and Space Division. When I worked there, the merger with United Technologies Corporation hadn't yet finalized, and the rebrand to "RTX" was still on the horizon.
I found this opportunity through my girlfriend at the time, who was family friends with the I&S Division's Chief of Staff. Never underestimate the power (and necessity) of networking!
My time was dedicated to developing orbit determination code for NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System 2 (JPSS-2). I also spent a good deal of time liaising with the customer, refining their requirements and elucidating how my team's work would satisfy them.
Over the course of the summer, I wrote the satellite's backorbit calculator. This software crunched the satellite's own ephemeris data to predict when it would enter and exit "backorbit" - locations where it could not communicate with any of our ground stations. When entering one of these zones, it would cease data transmission to save on power. The power margins on the spacecraft were thin enough that this conservational functionality was a necessity, not just a "nice-to-have."
I initially created the calculator in an Excel VBA macro to bolster and review my understanding of ephemerides and two-body orbital dynamics. Then, I ported the software into Perl, which was necessary to test and ultimately push to the spacecraft's final build. Not to mention the code could be made infinitely more elegant and compact in a scripting language such as Perl.
I was able to test the software on a simulation of the spacecraft in a SEIT ops-like environment, where a digital imitation of the spacecraft's lifetime was being run 24/7.
JPSS-2 launched from Vandenberg SFB on November 10, 2022. It flew on a ULA Atlas V rocket and shared the fairing with NASA's experimental LOFTID payload. The craft is currently operational and is expected to remain in operation for a minimum of 7 years.
I learned a ton about the behind-the-scenes of spacecraft over the few months I spent at Raytheon, but my biggest takeaway was that I couldn't spend the rest of my life as a programmer or dynamicist. Hardware is my bread and butter.
Three years after working on its predecessor, I would get to see JPSS-3 in its cleanroom in Gilbert, AZ. This followed an interview with the Northrop Grumman Spacecraft Integration team about their work on the HALO program, an essential part of NASA's planned lunar Gateway station.
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