2024-11-12 –, Aula Magna
Asteroid Institute is developing a suite of open-source tools tailored for solar system science, with a focus on precision, accuracy, and scalability. Key functionalities include orbit propagation, ephemeris generation, orbit fitting, residual calculation, coordinate transformations, arc extension, Monte Carlo simulations, and impact analysis. The libraries are all rigorously unit-tested and benchmarked as well as compatible with existing Python tools like astropy and pandas.
Our science workloads run compute-intensive tasks on billions of data points across thousands of VMs with a low memory footprint. We outline the design decisions of our libraries that significantly reduce memory consumption while enabling seamless multiprocessing. Additionally, we highlight the advantages of our type-safe dataframes and integer-based datetimes over traditional approaches. We also share our Python data packages for convenient access to SPICE kernels and more.
Alec is Head of Software Engineering at Asteroid Institute. He brings over a decade of experience building software and leading engineering teams at both startups and Fortune 100 companies. Before joining Asteroid Institute, Alec held the roles of CTO, VP of Engineering and Principal Engineer.
Alec also has a long history contributing to open source projects, spending time as an early core contributor of Saltstack and maintaining critical packages on PyPI with millions of downloads. Although not a security engineer by trade, he discovered CVE-2020-5252 which exposes a vulnerability in package scanning tools Snyk, safety, and npm audit.
Alec received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science & Physics from Marlboro College, where he wrote software for analyzing the performance of wind turbines. He lives on his homestead in southern Vermont.