PARSEC / AEGIS

For missions beyond low-Earth orbit, radiation becomes one of the most serious unsolved engineering constraints. Earth's magnetosphere does an enormous amount of work for us. Once you leave it, crew are exposed to galactic cosmic rays over mission timescales that passive shielding alone struggles to handle.

That is why the core idea here is active electromagnetic shielding. Instead of trying to absorb every incoming particle with impractical mass budgets, the goal is to shape magnetic fields that deflect charged particles away from the crew zone before they hit the habitat.

My work on AEGIS is not just one narrow slice. I contribute to both the physical system and the computational side used to analyse it. That means thinking about coil geometry, shielding gaps, and what an achievable field configuration looks like, but also about the simulation tooling needed to test those ideas. I also work on Altium to design the actual electronics used for our prototype.

On the software side, the digital twin is critical. It gives us a way to evaluate how candidate configurations behave under a range of particle trajectories, compare outcomes, and discuss the design using something more concrete than static equations.