Recap of Lagrange Points In the circular restricted three body problem, there are a set of 5 points that if we place our spacecraft there, it’ll never move relative to the two bodies. These are called the Lagrange points and are the only equilibrium points for the system. Whenever we find an equilibrium point in…
Chaos I’ve recreated one of my favorite mathematical demonstrations below. Three double pendulums, all starting with near identical initial conditions, all rapidly diverging. I love this demonstration because it’s such a great example of chaotic dynamics. What is Chaos? Chaotic dynamics, in a nutshell, means that a system is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. That…
Recap In the last post we introduced the 3-body problem along with some constraints that turned it into the circular restricted 3-Body Problem (CR3BP). In the beginning of that post, I had a GIF that traced out a trajectory in the Earth-Moon system. In this post, we will derive the equations of motion for the Circular…
Making a Lab a Home Engineering labs, like most work spaces, begin life as utterly functional sterile rooms. Sometimes they have cubicles, other times offices, and in a few rare occasions an open office layout, but they all begin sterile. Over time, the people who work there begin to fix it up and imbue within…
What is Journal club As a new grad student, I need to read a lot of papers. A rule of thumb for new grad students is to read 5-7 papers every week. As I read through them, I highlight statements, leave comments in the margins, and write up a small note about what I thought…
What is Newtons Method? Let’s say you had some function f(x), and you wanted to find where that function is equal to zero. If that function is a polynomial like the following we can plug it into the quadratic equation and find that the roots are -2 and -1. What about if the function is…
What is Orbit Determination When we are dealing with two bodies, we can determine their orbital paths exactly using a certain set of orbital elements. If you want to learn more about these orbital elements you can find my post on them here and how to use them to determine an orbital path here. If…
How I Came to Read Kelly Back when I was writing a review on Ben Rich’s Skunk Works, I was trying to find a way to procrastinate. On the bookshelf in front of me, was an unopened copy of Kelly: More than My Share of It All. This book is an autobiography of the life of…
So You’re Thinking about Graduate School I got into graduate school this year, and a lot of friends in their sophomore and junior year keep asking me about the process. I figure if so many people in real life are asking me about grad school, people online would probably also benefit from hearing about the…
Why I Chose to Read Skunkworks This last week I’ve been on vacation hiking in Yosemite. I brought Ben Rich’s Skunk Works with me as a way to entertain myself during the flight to California as well as during any downtime that might pop up on my trip. Skunkworks is an autobiographical account about one…
