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…
A Whole New Ballgame In the past, this blog has covered the 2-Body problem which is solvable (Kinda) and the general n-body problem which isn’t. We have a lot of insight into how the 2-body dynamics work, but unfortunately, they break down as soon as we get away from any major body. If you want…
Good Enough Numerical Methods are all about getting an answer that is good enough. A whole class of numerical methods are iterative methods, which continue running until they are good enough. Newton’s method is the example of an iterative method. It keeps going, making the error smaller and smaller until it finds a zero. A good…
Good Enough Numerical methods are always concerned with the term “good enough”. Whether you are using a finite difference to approximate a derivative, or Newtons method to find the roots of a function, we rarely get an exact answer. Usually, our answer is different from the truth by some amount. We generally don’t know what our error…
Bumpy Terrain Imagine you are halfway up a mountain. Half an hour ago you decided to start bushwhacking and now you’re completely turned around and lost. What’s worse is that you’ve also lost your map and compass. It’s getting late and you need to get back to your home at the foot of the mountain.…
Why Memory Cards are Useful Whenever a friend gets a camera, they usually come and ask me “What accessory should I get that will make me a better photographer?”. I’ll answer with two things, spare memory cards , and spare batteries. You don’t get better through better gear, you get better though practice. Practice in…
The Klaxon Starts Ringing Imagine it’s the year 2300. Earth and Mars are at war. You’re an Earth warship, blue, based on an asteroid in the asteroid belt. A martian drone, red, lands on the opposite side of the asteroid. It’s out of line of sight so how do you aim your rail-gun to destroy…
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…
