SETUP - Instructions for attendees to obtain the required libraries prior to the session are available from the workshop's GitHub page:

https://github.com/lancelet/space-workshop

There are also notes for the workshop, available from the same page.

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary year of the Apollo 11 moon landing, we present a spaceflight-themed exploration of numerical methods in Haskell!

This workshop focuses on both the joys and pain-points of intentionally using Haskell's abstraction capabilities for numerical work. We consider what approaches are available to make the time-domain simulation of dynamical systems safer. To do this, we solve practical problems by combining vector-spaces, units, linear, and several other libraries. The results are not always ergonomic (warning: may contain some horrible type errors), but we feel they help to demonstrate what is currently possible and motivate further development. Unlike many more theoretical presentations of this topic, our focus in this workshop is very much on solving real problems, selected from the published spaceflight literature.

Participants will use abstractions from the vector-spaces library, applied to numerical integration of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and simple optimization algorithms. They will see how algorithms written using these abstractions are more generic, even allowing types with statically-checked units to be used with them.

On the spaceflight side, participants will implement some basic spacecraft manoeuvres, and we include some pre-baked simulations that interact with participants' code. Among the scenarios examined is a simulation of the lunar ascent phase of the Apollo missions, including a faithful transcription into Haskell of the actual guidance algorithm used during the lunar ascent (our Haskell version has statically-checked units!).

We encourage all forms of participation; from people who want to follow the prescribed set of problems, to those who may want to re-implement our examples in other languages, or just deep-dive into the spaceflight theory. All the problems have fallback solutions that can be examined or called directly.