This week, our team made significant progress on our satellite simulator in preparation for Prototype Inspection Day next week. In last week’s update, we shared our initial prototype of a basic rule-based system. This provided a solid foundation for an end-to-end simulation of satellite motion and tasking.

Since then, we’ve upgraded to a more realistic model that uses satellite state vectors instead of the previous grid-based propagation. This improvement allows the simulator to more accurately represent the orbital motion and system state over time, but maintains the basic rule-based decision-making. We also integrated it with a frontend view of the Earth, which will hopefully make our project and backend code easier to understand on Prototype Day. This frontend view is in the figure below. There is still plenty to do to upgrade this simulation in the coming weeks.

We’re excited to attend Prototype Day next week, show off our work, get feedback from UF faculty judges, and keep improving!