Juliacon 2024

The SatelliteToolbox.jl Ecosystem
07-10, 14:30–15:00 (Europe/Amsterdam), While Loop (4.2)

The SatelliteToolbox.jl ecosystem was created almost ten years ago to contain functions for solving satellite-related problems using the Julia language. Since then, it has become an essential asset for the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) when analyzing space missions. This talk presents the ecosystem's main functions and shows case studies of demands put by the Brazilian space program that were solved using SatelliteToolbox.jl.


We created the SatelliteToolbox.jl package almost ten years ago to provide a set of functions for the Julia language to perform several satellite-related analyses. Since then, this toolbox has been extensively used in many projects of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

Currently, the ecosystem contains functions that can be used to perform many kinds of analyses from the Pre-Phase A up to the operational phase of a satellite. We can create propagators, transform reference systems, compute atmospheric density and magnetic field, and more.

This talk presents the main functions of the twelve packages that form the SatelliteToolbox.jl ecosystem. We also show case studies based on actual demands for the Brazilian space program that were addressed by those algorithms.

See also: GitHub

Since 2013, Ronan Arraes Jardim Chagas has been with the Space Systems Division of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (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 15 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, PrettyTables.jl, and others.

This speaker also appears in: