Jean-Baptiste Panais became our colleague on June 15, during the pandemic. He worked with us for this master thesis 'Preparation of the scientific operations for the PROBA-3 mission'. On November 26, after his master defense, he will get his diploma of engineer from the French school ELISA Aerospace, where he specialised in Missiles and Space Systems Engineering. But before he leaves, he will tell us about his adventures at the STCE.
Jean-Baptiste Panais about his internship in the PROBA-3 team:
'My internship in the Solar Physics and Space Weather department (consisted mainly in preparing scientific operations for the PROBA-3 mission. Focusing on the Selective Downlink and the Mass Memory Management (MMM), I first implemented an algorithm in Python aiming to produce the Time-Based Selective Downlink Request (TB-SDR) file, using the current state of the memory, observation programs and user preferences. During the PROBA-3 Critical Design Review (CDR), my work consisted in testing a code emulating the MMM, and I was in charge of writing the test cases, creating the test files and writing the test report. The test report helped the team to identify issues and request fixes before the CDR closeout. In the last months, my work was about using SolarSoft and a tool called FORWARD in order to create images simulating how the coronagraph ASPIICS inside the spacecraft would see the Sun’s corona. Since FORWARD was not able to genuinely produce images using the bandwidth of ASPIICS’ filters but only an image in Sun Brightness units, I developed another Python code to apply the wideband filters’ response to the data and to render images with different exposure times.'
