On September 4th, 2023, a sample return canister will hopefully plummet through the skies of Utah. This sample return canister, after being charred due to the heat of atmospheric re-entry, will be brought to Johnston space center where scientists will open it to reveal up to 2 kilograms of the asteroid Bennu. This will mark…
Disclaimer: Plotly paid me to both make a dash app, as well as this post. Even before this I was a fan of Plotly’s products and used them in posts about missed thrust events and visualizing periodic orbits. In those projects, I used Plotly because they make some great visualization tools. You should check their…
Psyche For an orbital mechanics HW I was looking at Psyche and the effects of different perturbations. Psyche, an M-type asteroid, is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt and contains about 1% of the belt’s entire mass. As an M-Type asteroid, Psyche is expected to be a reddish world mostly made up…
Ceres In 2006, the International Astronautical Federation formally defined both planets and dwarf planets. “A “dwarf planet” is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the…
What are Attractors Attractors, in dynamical systems are structures that a lot of initial conditions evolve to over time. When the dynamics are chaotic, if an attractor exists, they often have a fractal structure which makes them gorgeous to visualize and are called strange attractors. Below are three, 3-dimensional strange attractors as well as the…
Earlier last week I was talking to one of my undergrads about the different subspecialties in astrodynamics and I’ve decided to distill that conversation into the following blogpost. Trajectory Design The best-known sub-specialty of astrodynamics, and the one that I’m in, is trajectory design. We answer questions like how do we get from Earth to…
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…
Introduction NOTE: This is a very graphics-heavy post and may take some time to load. Lagrange points are those points in the three-body system where the tug of gravity from the two primary bodies cancel out and any spacecraft stays in the same relative position with the two primary bodies. If you are in the rotating…
Intro Last year we had a 2 part series on how to land on the moon using a suicide burn. There, the condition was that we could only turn on the engine once, and it had to be fully throttled. But most landers can control their thrust, so in this post we’re going to go…
Once you derive the equations of motion for a system, the next step in simulating it numerically is to compute the state-space representation, the backbone of modern contorl theroy. This is useful because by placing the equations of motion in a common format we can apply a whole host of techniques to study the system.…
