“In this photo, I’m exiting a ground station on top of the Department of Space Science & Engineering at Taiwan’s National Central University, near Taipei. I lead the university’s Upper Air Dynamics Laboratory, where my team and I focus on the design of satellites and scientific payloads used to explore the space environment and space weather. We also operate some spacecraft.
The station receives large volumes of data from our active spacecraft for analysis. We can communicate with spacecraft in Earth’s orbit only when they are in our direct field of view; the rest of the time, the Earth blocks the signal.
For low Earth orbit, which is where most satellites are located, we have only two windows a day for direct communication, and each is typically less than ten minutes. This means that spacecraft and their payloads must operate autonomously, and designing space systems that can meet this requirement is a key goal for our projects.
