LightSail Deployment Sim
Simulation of on-orbit free-flying light sail deployment from the Cornell Alpha CubeSat, developed and choreographed in Unreal Engine 4. Alpha was deployed from the ISS via Nanoracks in late 2025, carrying the world's first retroreflective, free-flying light sail and becoming a trailblazer for future missions to our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. Alpha concluded mission ops in early 2026, with a follow-on in the pipeline at the Space Systems Design Studio.
Detecting Cloud Cover from Space Using Infrared Sensors (Miami Young Data Scientists)
Our winning entry in the 2015 Association of Space Explorers (ASE) Astrosat Challenge ran a machine-learning experiment aboard Spire Global's Lemur-2 nanosatellite.
Put simply, the model answered one question: is it a cloud or not? Working within a 15 KB data budget, we used a support vector machine to classify roughly 1,500 infrared observations and validated the results against live weather data, achieving about 75% accuracy.
My teammate and I delivered our findings to the local Miami tech community with the Countdown Institute and taught introductory space and data science to local students.
