Peter Chapin

With a background in electrical engineering and computer science, Peter has an interest in both the hardware and software aspects of computer systems. He is the software director of Vermont Tech's CubeSat Laboratory where he coordinates the development of the high integrity software used in Vermont Tech's CubeSat missions. Peter is also involved in certain open source projects including Open Watcom and various others mentioned on his GitHub page.

In the past, Peter has served on X3J16, the ANSI technical committee charged with creating and maintaining the C++ standard (that work is currently being managed by ISO's WG21). More recently he has conducted research on programming language based security in wireless sensor networks (SpartanRPC and Scalaness). He has co-authored a book on the high integrity programming language SPARK 2014.

Peter has an interest in astronomy, waterfalls, and creative writing.

by Peter Chapin

Ten Years of Using SPARK to Build CubeSat Nano Satellites With Students

My colleague, Carl Brandon, and I have been running the CubeSat Laboratory at Vermont Technical College (VTC) for over ten years. During that time we have worked with nearly two dozen students on building and programming CubeSat nano satellites. Because of their general inexperience, and because of the high student turnover rate that is natural in an educational setting, our development process is often far from ideal. Here SPARK has been extremely valuable to us. What we lack in rigor of the development process we make up for in the rigor of the SPARK language and tools. In November 2013 we launched a low Earth orbiting CubeSat. The launch vehicle contained 13 other university built CubeSats. Most were never heard from. One worked for a few months. Ours worked for two years until it reentered Earth's atmosphere as planned in November 2015.

#SPARK #Space #Education #Safety