What do I Do All Day?

I work at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Most recently I've been hobnobbing around the Space Department writing flight software code for the New Horizons mission to Pluto which, if lucky, will be lobbed towards our beloved chunk-o-rock sometime in early 2006. Information about the spacecraft and the mission in general can be found at The JHU/APL New Horizons Mission webpage.

Bonus points if you can pick me out of the team photo:


The Team

There are about 5-8 Command and Data Handling software engineers. This is the picture of the whole team: testers, hardware people, software people, managers, schedulers, scientists, etc…

Writing flight software has been an interesting challenge. Radiation hardened processors and "new-fangled technology" don't hang out in the same bar, and I've been writing C code with compilers that have been compiling longer than I have. Maybe one day we will see Linux in Space. Although I'd be happy to get real-time C++ flight software. We'll have to see. Right now I might just be talking crazy -- it's so hard to tell sometimes.

-Ed