Summer 2023
It's summer time!
No doubt, you will be looking forward to some sunshine and relaxing after school ends for the year. In this newsletter we look at the relationship between holidays and programming - the entire journey from picking your holiday to landing at your destination is filled with computers and coding!
The holiday journey starts with a booking website full of algorithms that suggest your perfect getaway, and compare flights and hotels with your search criteria. Once you are at the airport, all sorts of computing is completed to get you onto a plane, which in turn is guided by air traffic control to guide your plane through the airspace to your destination. Imagine all of the calculations!
For some advanced computing in flight calculations, we celebrate Melba Mouton and her work at NASA’s flight centre. Read more about her below.
Melba Mouton (1929-1990)
Mouton worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, coding computer programs to calculate the trajectories and locations of various aircraft.
She also led the group of "human computers," who tracked the Echo satellites. Mouton and her team's computations helped produce the orbital element timetables by which millions could view the satellite from Earth as it passed overhead.
How have computers helped aviation?
Just as computers have affected virtually every aspect of modern life, from medicine to sports to education, they have also had a major impact on aviation. Computers are now used in all parts of aviation. They are used to design airplanes, to control them in flight, and to ensure that they reach their destinations safely and (more or less) on time.
The latest application of computers (to airplane technology) is for what is called "the Airborne Internet." Airplanes will be connected by radio and satellite link to a global information system that will provide them with information on the weather and aircraft in their immediate vicinity, as well as their flight plan.
The ultimate application of computers may be to take over control of flying completely. Already planes can be flown over long distances, with multiple course changes, entirely by computer. They can also take off and land automatically (although current flight rules prohibit this). It is not a far step to completely automatic operation.
Did you know?
Are you stuck for where to go on holiday?
Maybe you can write a program to help…
Can you write a program using Python that asks what animal you’d like to see on your holidays and then outputs one of the counties where you can see that animal in the wild?
E.g.
Solutions to the exercise are here.
Under The Spotlight
Tom Regan
I’m a Software Engineer at Ocado, and I work on the systems that run our customer fulfilment centres.
Building software requires planning, organisation, and communication. Just like air traffic controllers managing multiple aircraft, software engineers juggle many complex tasks at once as we design, build, and debug systems.
At Ocado we face the very busy traffic management, based on air traffic control and path planning in real-time. Our robots travel at 15kph along tracks over 7 metres from the ground, and pass one another just 5 millimetres apart. Safety is our number one priority, and we work carefully to keep our complex network of moving machines running smoothly.
What I enjoy most is working as part of a team; it allows me to design things that are much bigger than I could build on my own, and see them come to life - together we can turn big ideas into working systems. It’s an incredibly rewarding feeling.
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