Austin was born and raised on Maui, and he is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Austin is an Eagle Scout who plans on using leadership skills he learned in scouting and technical skills from college to start his own company. Austin enjoys the outdoors, the gym, video games, and quality time with friends.
Home Island: Maui, Hawaii
High School:
Institution when accepted: Purdue University
Creating a Camera Driver for a Space Domain Awareness Telescope
Project Site: KBR, Kihei, HI
Mentors: Randy Goebbert & Kurt Matillano
Project Abstract:
Due to the rapidly growing number of objects orbiting Earth, there is an increasing need to observe and track satellites to avoid collisions and ensure the ethical use of space assets. The Kihei, Maui, division of KBR is engaged in a large-scale project to develop a system of small autonomous telescopes that will perform automated surveys of the sky with the aim of identifying and tracking these satellites. These small telescopes require custom drivers to control various subsystems, including operation of the cameras. This new driver must be compliant with current standards in astronomy. This means complying with procedures set up by ASCOM (Astronomy Common Object Model) and ASCOM Alpaca, which is a RESTful API that uses network communication to communicate between applications and devices in all operating systems. A driver compliant with these rules was created by systematically interfacing with each of the camera’s settings and ensuring that a single camera setting can be manipulated by running a simple Python script. Once the camera setting was reacting appropriately, it was made to respond to commands pre-specified by ASCOM by conjoining the aforementioned Python script with endpoints that the operating system can communicate with. Then, these steps were repeated with every setting KBR wanted to manipulate. As a result of this new driver, KBR has the groundwork to create other ASCOM compliant drivers for other pieces of hardware and can control their camera fully autonomously, without the need for human interaction.