Advisory Board

Professor Sandy (Alex) Antunes

Sandy (Alex) Antunes, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor, Capitol College where he teaches courses in satellite operation and instrumentation.
 
Sandy authored Surviving Orbit the DIY Way: Testing the Limits Your Satellite Can and Must Match, DIY Satellite Platforms: Building a Space-Ready General Base Picosatellite for Any Mission, and DIY Instruments for Amateur Space: Inventing Utility for Your Spacecraft Once it Achieves Orbit. His articles include The First Kickstarter Satellites, Lego-style Vs Custom Shop CubeSat Construction, Telstar, Tornados, And Telecasters, Derating Off-the-shelf Parts So They Work, Rockets, Asteroids, Gold Rushes And … Conferences?, Swimming In The (astro) Pacific, The Phantom Of The Laboratory, Engineering Roleplaying, Stars That Ring Like Bells, Open Notebook Astronomy, Science is Hard…, Asperger’s Rule Processing, and Zombies: The Safer Terrorists. Read all his Satellite Diaries articles and his The Sky by Dan articles.
 
His journal articles include On the 3-D reconstruction of Coronal Mass Ejections using coronagraph data, Hybrid Reconstruction to Derive 3D Height-Time Evolution for Coronal Mass Ejections, Dynamical Parameters for AM 0644–741, Projecting 3-D Simulations Into Pseudo Observations, ASCA: An International Mission, Astro-E’s Mission Independent Scheduling Suite, A High Capacity Object Oriented Mission Scheduling System for XTE, ASCA observations of the coronal X-ray emission of Algol, and A predictive model for space-based X-ray CCD degradation.
 
Sandy is also known as a game industry expert for the tabletop RPG business. Tabletop work is now an IP-rich environment also suitable for paper prototyping for computer and mobile gaming. In addition, he brings experience from the LARP segment of gaming to produce training and simulation exercises within the context of work sites, projects such as Destination Imagination, and to make the world a more interesting place.
 
Sandy cofounded the top-ranked RPG site rpg.net, built the first online ebook mall for RPGs, and has served twice as executive director for the board of the not-for-profit Game Publishers Association.
 
His published work includes RPG adventures, rulebooks, encyclopedias, games for children, and far too many essays about game design and the industry. He also consults for startup game ventures. Read his over 13 years of gaming columns. Learn about his PDF products available at DriveThruRPG.
 
Sandy earned his BS in Astronomy and Physics at Boston University in 1989. He earned his MS in Astrophysics at Penn State in 1992. He earned his Ph.D. in Computational Astrophysics at George Mason University in 2005.
 
Listen to his 365 Days of Astronomy podcasts. Read Sandy Antunes: Building Satellites to Listen to Space. Read his LinkedIn profile, his O’Reilly Media profile, and his Wikipedia profile.