AST Configurator

Last updated Wed Aug 17 2022

In the summer of 2022, I had the opportunity to work as an intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was definitely one of the coolest experiences of my life and I will never forget the technology that I was able to get up close to. I was tasked with creating a configuration tool for deploying a suite of open-source ground data system (GDS) software onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). These software systems could then be used by both JPL researchers and other organizations to manage data coming in from small sattelite missions, such as Cubesat. However, the tricky part was that nobody on the team really wanted to write any Javascript/Typescript to modify it once I left. So I had to create a system where all of the prompts, software options, and user flows could be configured just with JSON documents.

Stack

The project used React and NextJS. It really is just a single page app, but I chose NextJS to take advantage of some fun features like font optimization that come out of the box.

Features

The project has three main sections: an initial questionnaire to determine what software is needed for the mission, a selection screen where eligible software can be included or excluded, and then configuration for both the software and its deployment into AWS.