Rust in Space! How Rust is Powering Next-Generation Space Mission Simulators
summary
Ephemerista is an ESA funded open source space mission simulator built in Rust with a locks astrodynamics library and a Python API via pyo3, funded at about €250k, developed by a 3–4 person team over ~18 months. It models seven astronomical time scales, implements a 128-bit time representation (i64 seconds + f64 subsecond) to preserve femto‑second precision where needed, encodes leap‑second aware UTC at IO boundaries, and prioritises parallel performance over Python while already supporting GUI and pluggable integrations.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction to Ephemerista
- 2:27Modern space industry needs
- 5:22The case for open source
- 6:47Why use Rust for space
- 10:27Engineering the Lox library
- 13:41Challenges in time modeling
- 16:41Implementing high-precision time
- 17:51Handling time invariants
- 19:26The problem with UTC
- 21:26Astronomical time scales
- 22:07Modeling time scales in Rust
- 23:03Python and Rust interoperability
- 30:16Time scale transformations
- 32:36Advanced trait specialization
- 33:41Infallible vs fallible conversions
- 34:23Batteries included API
- 35:38Q&A and closing thoughts
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