macnetic

Not just switching, you can use all of the beams simultaneously.

We're hard at work on space optical comms at Mbryonics, and hiring right now: https://mbryonics.com/careers/

We use the Celestial Altium Library [1], it's really good for passive components, which make up ~80% of our schematics by count. For other parts we first try to get them through Altium Manufacturer Part Search, we vet the symbol and footprints before importing them into our internal library. Other model sources in order of preference is SnapMagic, UltraLibrarian, Samacsys. Be aware as the quality is often half-baked. Between components that meet my requirements, I will always pick the one with CAD models easily available.

With those prerequisites I only have to make 2-3 footprints from scratch per project as needed, and less so as our library grows.

[1] https://altiumlibrary.com/

This book on ADC and DACs was extremely useful to keep in a work project. TI also have good resources

[1] https://www.analog.com/en/resources/technical-books/data-con...

[2] https://www.ti.com/lit/ml/snaa106c/snaa106c.pdf

ADI has some of the best technical resources in the industry, I have learned so much from them even when not using their components.

The Proba missions are technology demonstrators. The main goal of Proba-3 is to demonstrate precision formation flying [1], which would enable large instruments in space without the need for large mechanical structures and complicated deployment mechanisms. Even in the age of Starship this could be useful.

The coronagraph is one example of an instrument that benefits from formation flying, but its actually considered a guest payload on Proba-3. Benefits of formation flying include being able to adjust the distance between the two spacecraft to block more or less of the Sun disk. Also in traditional coronagraphs the occluding disk is held in place with struts that obscure parts of the corona.

Other applications that could benefit are telescopes (radio, optical, X-ray), interferometric SAR, in-space inspection and servicing of existing satellites, to name a few.

[1] https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/proba-3

A spinout from my university, UMag Solutions is detecting UXO and mines in Ukraine using special drone-mounted magnetometers.

Commercial Crew is fixed-price contracts, whereas cost-plus contracts has been the norm in the US aerospace industry. Boeing is the one bleeding money here.

You should look up image sensor dark noise. One way to reduce dark noise is taking an exposure without any light on the sensor, it should give you the fixed pattern which can be subtracted from your scene image. Dark noise is sensitive to temperature and exposure time, so you should try to do this under similar conditions.

HF is 3 MHz to 30 MHz. Yes it does not make much sense, the term is ancient.

Laplace and z-transform are widely used in control systems and signal processing. Both are more general forms of the Fourier transform in continuous and discrete time, respectively.

There's both types of seat arrangements

ESA is an independent entity from EU.