Roxana defends her work on reliability estimation of satellite constellations

Great news! Yesterday ir. Roxana Băcălie successfully defended her MSc thesis: Evaluating the Communication Reliability of Earth-Moon Satellite Constellations Using Model Counting!

The idea for this project was born during a Dagstuhl seminar on Optimization and Automated Reasoning for Designing Future Space Missions, where I met Dr. Max Bannach from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Advanced Concepts Team (ACT). Motivated by the recent interest in Lunar missions (e.g., ispace’s HAKUTO-R missions and NASA’s Artemis missions), and the pollution of the night sky with many satellites (at least on my side), we wanted to design a robust satellite communication network for the Moon-Earth system, using a minimal number of deployed satellites. A challenging problem that requires combinatorial reasoning over uncertainty in a dynamically changing system.

While Roxana did not manage to solve the entire problem, she delivered a solid contribution that future MSc students (or other researchers) will build on. She investigated the influence that different ways of modelling such a Moon-Earth system of communication satellites have on her ability to reason over the system. Here, she used inter-satellite distance as the key component to computing the probability that two satellites can communicate with each other.

As always, it was also a pleasure to work with Roxana’s other supervisor, Dr. Neil Yorke-Smith, her mentor Dr. Max Bannach, and to learn from the input of her external examiner, Prof. Dr. Frans Oliehoek.

However: the most important collaboration was of course with Roxana. I much enjoyed working with her. She was keen to deliver a high-quality model, and did not stop asking questions until she understood the important details. I appreciated her honesty and her contributions to the research group. I am sure that she will do great in her new role as Software Engineer at TomTom!