Hello! I am Sankar 👋

I am a software craftsman. In my day job I have created software solutions in networking and storage domains over a couple of decades. Outside of work, I am passionate about computing, astronomy, science, and photography.

Connect with me:

Key Projects on Github

I have developed spacecraft orbit animations for Chandrayaan-3 (ISRO), Chandrayaan-2 (ISRO), Mars Orbiter Mission (ISRO), and New Horizons (NASA) for educational purposes. These animations use real orbit ephemerides data from JPL NASA shared via the Horizons platform. I have been influential in making this data public for the first time in 2013 during the Mars Orbiter Mission. I am thankful to Jon D. Giorgini at JPL who has been very supportive in answering my queries during the development of these scientific visualizations. While all animations support 2D, the Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3 animations also support 3D. All animations have controls to visualize the orbits as heliocentric, geocentric, selenocentric, or Mars centric as the case may be. You can pan and zoom as well or keep an object of interest centered while the world moves around it. Mission timelines are shown with annotated events such as orbit boost burns and orbit insertions. Reference planes such as the equator, ecliptic, lunar orbit, or the Moon's sphere of influence can also be visualized. Source code for these animations are available on this Github site under the MIT license.

I have conducted multiple educational outreach sessions on these missions at universities and astronomy clubs. The animations and talks have been well received over social media and in the astronomy community for their educational content.

Here are some related links:

• Asianet news clip
• Bangalore Astronomy Society lecture - YouTube | Slides
• RV University lecture
• Amrita University lecture
• The Wire article
• ISRO social media post on MoM
• Reddit post on Chandrayaan-3 animation
• Reddit post on Chandrayaan 2 crash site location analysis
• Reddit posts on Chandrayaan-2 (one, two, three)

Chandrayaan-3 Mission Design Tool

An interactive 3D educational tool for learning orbital mechanics through Chandrayaan-3's mission design. Features three modes: Explore (manual control of all parameters), Plan (mission planning with real lunar ephemeris), and Game (playback with capture detection). Built with Three.js and astronomy-engine for accurate celestial mechanics.

🚀 Live Demo

Chandrayaan-3 Mission Design Source

Chandrayaan 3

Chandrayaan-3 (ISRO, Wikipedia) is the third lunar exploration mission developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation under the Chandrayaan program. It consists of a lunar lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan, and a propulsion module. It was launched on 14th July, 2023. The lander touched down the lunar surface successfully on 23rd August, 2023.

Chandrayaan 3 Animation Source

Chandrayaan 2

Chandrayaan-2 (ISRO, Wikipedia) is the second lunar exploration mission developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation under the Chandrayaan program after Chandrayaan-1. It consists of a lunar orbiter, a lander named Vikram, and a rover named Pragyan, all of which were developed in India. It was launched on 22 July 2019. Lunar orbit insertion was done on 22 August 2019. The Vikram lander was lost on 6 September 2019 very close to lunar landing.

Chandrayaan 2 Animation Source

Mars Orbiter Mission

The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called Mangalyaan (ISRO, Wikipedia) is a space probe orbiting Mars since 24 September 2014. It was launched on 5 November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It is India's first interplanetary mission and it made it the fourth space agency to achieve Mars orbit, after Roscosmos, NASA, and the European Space Agency. It made India the first Asian nation to reach Martian orbit and the first nation in the world to do so on its maiden attempt.

Mars Orbiter Mission Animation Source

New Horizons Pluto Mission

New Horizons (NASA, Wikipedia) is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by Alan Stern, the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015, and a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the decade to follow, which became a mission to 486958 Arrokoth. It is the fifth space probe to achieve the escape velocity needed to leave the Solar System.