ACMES (Active Cooling for Multispectral Earth Sensors) is a NASA-funded 6U CubeSat mission validating cryogenic cooling and methane-sensing technologies for small satellite Earth observation.

• Re-architected the satellite ground station telemetry system from a monolithic, globally-coupled Python application into a modular, queue-driven pipeline — reducing the codebase from ~20K to ~10K lines while adding 99 automated tests where the original had none
• Achieved 100x+ reduction in per-packet processing latency by replacing Python-level byte iteration with C-level buffer search, eliminating deepcopy on the hot path, and removing a 1-second polling latency floor caused by polled message routing
• Replaced a centralized message router and deep inheritance hierarchy with bounded queue pipelines and composable pipeline stages, eliminating deadlock-prone cross-thread patterns and cutting per-component complexity by an order of magnitude
• Introduced build/start lifecycle separation and dependency injection, enabling a 99-test suite that runs without Docker or hardware dependencies
• Architected a communication bridge between proprietary packet processing software and OpenC3 COSMOS for telecommanding