Ronan Arraes Jardim Chagas
Since 2013, Ronan Arraes Jardim Chagas has been with the Space Systems Division of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE). As his most significant accomplishment, he was the Mission Architect and the responsible technician of the attitude and orbit control subsystem (AOCS) of the Brazilian Satellite Amazonia 1, successfully launched in February 2021.
He has been working with Control Systems and Signal Processing for 17 years. During this time, he was involved in many projects related to those areas. He successfully embedded Kalman filters (Extended and Unscented) in many autonomous systems and developed state-of-art signal processing algorithms to perform estimation in distributed sensor networks.
He conducts several research projects at INPE. Those projects include artificial intelligence and advanced control techniques applied to the AOCS, space mission design optimization, advanced signal processing, and orbit analysis.
He is also a Julia language enthusiast. He has used it daily since 2013 to perform many activities related to his work. As his most significant project with this language, he developed a complete AOCS simulator to test and verify this subsystem. The simulation achieved outstanding performance and accuracy, given the orbital data collected from the satellite Amazonia 1.
He is the creator and maintainer of some important packages of the Julia language ecosystem: ReferenceFrameRotations.jl, SatelliteToolbox.jl, SatelliteAnalysis.jl, PrettyTables.jl, and others.
Session
The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) is developing Amazonia 1B, an Earth observation satellite with an enhanced-resolution camera for environmental monitoring. Although its bus is nearly identical to Amazonia 1, launched in 2021, the new payload requires a different orbit, demanding the redesign of several mission aspects. The mission design phase was conducted using the Julia ecosystem, with core algorithms encapsulated in the public packages SatelliteToolbox.jl and SatelliteAnalysis.jl. This presentation covers how Julia was leveraged for orbit selection, eclipse duration and beta angle computation, and ground station access and gap estimation. The results were incorporated into the Amazonia-1B Critical Design Review (CDR), which occurred in November 2025, and validated by the review board without issues, demonstrating the maturity and reliability of the Julia ecosystem for operational space mission design.