A while ago I set up SpaceBot, a twitter bot designed to post about space. In the meantime, I’ve rolled out some upgrades to it. Here they are,
What Happened in Deep Space Today
By looking at Jonathan McDowell’s deep space catalog, SpaceBot now posts a random event that happened that day in deep space in the past. This will hopefully help people connect with deep space exploration and get to know some lesser-known missions.
Periodic orbits in the Earth-Moon System.
Spacebot also now generates and plots a random periodic orbit in the Earth-Moon System, like the one shown below. If you want to interactively investigate all the different families of periodic orbits around Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, you can find those about the colinear Lagrange points (L1, L2, L3) here, and those about the equilateral Lagrange points (L4, L5) here. If you just want to learn about the Lagrange points you can find a post I made about that here!
Space bot can be found here so check it out!
As always, the code for space bot can be found here.
Depreciated Features
Spacebot is not permanent; features will come and go. The first to depart is the daily announcement of the two objects with the highest probability of collision. This feature will not be leaving twitter though, as it’s finding a new home on the SOSTC twitter account.
What is SOSTC?
“The SOSTC is concerned with all aspects of civil, military, and commercial space operations and support, including direct and supporting operations, the systems and software affecting operations, and space operations and operational risk management. The SOSTC addresses all types of space operations, including manned and unmanned space operations from low Earth-orbiting to deep-space systems. It is involved with all phases of mission operations, including pre-launch and launch activities, early mission commissioning activities, on-orbit activities, cruise and encounter activities, post-landing activities, and end-of-life operations. The SOSTC likewise addresses space related operational support activities, including training, servicing, mission planning, flight dynamics, telemetry transmission, command and control, and data handling, processing, analysis, and storage.
The SOSTC seeks to improve all these aspects of space operations by increasing the exchange of knowledge among those actively engaged in space operations, documenting the results, and making those results available to the broader space systems community.”
Want More Gereshes?
If you want to receive new Gereshes blog post directly to your email when they come out, you can sign up for that here!
Don’t want another email? That’s ok, Gereshes also has a twitter account and subreddit!