Science
About Me
I was born and raised in Merseburg, Germany, where I also received my Bachelor's degree in Mechatronics, Industrial and Physics Technology (Bachelor of Engineering, B.Eng.) in 2009 as well as my Master's degree in Computer Science and Communication Systems/Artificial Intelligence (Master of Engineering, M.Eng.) in 2012 at the Merseburg University of Applied Sciences.
Since the end of my university education, I am living and working in Bremen, where I am employed at the Department of Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) Systems of the Institute of Space Systems, German Aerospace Center (DLR). I am the Head of the GNC Appliances Group, a research group responsible for the design, development, implementation, testing, and verification of GNC systems for space applications. GNC systems are a critical and complex part of most space systems. Their purpose is to determine the space system's position and orientation and to guide and control its movement in the space environment (and sometimes within Earth's atmosphere). This includes, among others, the attitude and orbit control of satellites, the navigation and control of launch vehicles and interplanetary probes, or the re-entry/return flight and landing of reusable launch vehicles, re-entry systems or landers to land on other celestial bodies like the Moon, Mars, or asteroids. In the field of satellites, GNC systems are also often referred to as attitude and orbit control (AOCS) systems.
My primary fields of work encompass the overall systems engineering of GNC systems and the complete end-to-end development of the embedded systems (on-board computers, sensors, actuators, electronics for interfacing, data acquisition and processing, power distribution, etc.) they are comprised of. This includes hardware and software development as well as the design, implementation, and operation of specialized test and verification setups and facilities (e.g. Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) Test Benches). Another branch of my work is the high-precision simulation of GNC/AOCS systems together with the accompanying software engineering. I am also pursuing a PhD thesis within these fields.
In my private life, I try to follow my interests as much as possible. Most of them are in the domain of computer technology (e.g., I support a bunch of open source software projects), but I am also interested in legal topics. This is why I enrolled in a bachelor of law degree program at the FernUniversität Hagen, Germany, in 2016. I pursue these studies in my spare time in form of distant learning courses.
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