Florian Grader-Beck Email & Phone Number

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

San Francisco, California, United States

• Streamlined the guidance and navigation data pipeline for Astranis’ newest “block” of GEO satellites, which will provide broadband internet to geographically remote and developing regions.• Implemented “operations” scripts in Python that mission control personnel run in real-time to receive satellite ephemeris telemetry and update orbit determination algorithms on the ground.• Verified my software by leveraging Astranis’ in-house dynamics simulator to manipulate the satellite’s state machine (e.g. to put the satellite in orbit raise, sun-pointing, etc.) and verify the desired telemetry was captured.• Currently writing software to send Orbit Comprehensive Messages (OCMs) containing maneuver data to external vendors for thrust characterizations of the satellites.

College Park, Md

• Predicted the rotational motion of a 3D rigid body to within 99.99% accuracy using Taylor seriesapproximation and an energy and momentum-preserving discretization of Euler’s second law.• Identified quadratic error behavior of the energy and momentum-preserving algorithm by iterating time step size across ten trials in MATLAB.• Submitted and presented a 9-page conference paper on numerical integration solvers for rigid body dynamics to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

College Park, Maryland, United States

As a GSS leader, I prepared bi-weekly study sessions for a 100+ student differential equations course to help supplement in-class learning. I designed my own lesson plans and was responsible for attending lectures as well as weekly check-ins with the math faculty member I GSS for.

Laurel, Maryland, United States

• Increased radar software testing capacity by 4x with a custom MATLAB script to generate aircraft kinematics based on user inputs for takeoff and landing coordinates, flight time, and altitude.• Achieved 100% integration between my program and existing software by utilizing coordinate transformations between ECEF, ENU, and LLA reference frames to manipulate aircraft vector datasets.• Secured funding from the project sponsor through a software demo that used a Python GUI to display aircraft trajectories and update visibility to strategically placed radars.• Sought feedback on my GUI and kinematics tool at weekly meetings with the PI and 5 other APL employees.

College Park, Maryland, United States

As a member of this student engineering team, I worked with fellow UMD engineering students to design the excavation subsystem for a small-scale tunnel boring machine. This involved extensive use of Siemens NX 11 to create 3D models, draft engineering drawings, and conduct finite element analysis. In the spring of 2021, the team made it to the finals of the "Not-a-Boring" Competition hosted by The Boring Company in Las Vegas, Nevada. We were one of 12 teams out of 390 applicants to make it to this stage and won an award for "Best Safety" after the competition.