Interview Available

Otherworldly Java: Gateway to the Moon and Beyond

What does astrodynamics  have to do with Java?

When we’re trying to design spacecraft orbits under the influence of both a planet and a moon at the same time, we find ourselves with an enormous design space. We don't have analytical solutions anymore; we have a few equilibrium points, there are families of orbits around those equilibrium points, but beyond there’s a vast design space that you can't just boil down to an equation. How to manage this design space is a hard problem, and lots of folks in my community have solved this using grid searches and other numerical methods. We're geeks, and lots of folks focus on the numbers, with visualization maybe as an afterthought, as an extra at the end. But that's not my preference. There are a few of us who see the power of visualization itself as a design tool. We want to incorporate the visualization into the design process so that I can use my intuition and my knowledge and my understanding to find families of solutions and understand why the trajectories are behaving the way they are rather than just looking at numerical output, point solutions without context.

What are the main goals for your talk?

There are two points of focus that I'd like to share that are really exciting to me. One is that it’s possible to use JavaFX and Java for a desktop application. We've built an amazing beautiful tool that is incredibly interactive that we're using for spaceflight design. Granted that's a little bit of a niche market. There aren’t a whole lot of us in this field, but as a broader visualization and data management tool, JavaFX has so much potential, so I want to show some of the amazing things that we've managed to put together. And on the other side, it's been a really special project in that we've had a very effective collaboration between an absolute expert Java developer and an expert in astrodynamics.  Neither of us alone could have visualized this tool. It’s based on my PhD research, and Sean Phillips saw it at a presentation I did and knew he could take it to another level. Together we turned it into this piece of software that makes the process effortless.