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…
Last week in my lab’s journal club I was presenting on two white papers detailing the reasoning for possible missions to explore the outer solar system. These papers are part of the Astro2020 decadal survey, and I figured I would share some thoughts on them here. As both papers are short (<10 pages each) and…
Balancing a Marble Imagine you had a marble and you wanted to put it at the point between the Earth and the Moon where the force of gravity was equal from both. The two forces would cancel out, and the marble would remain in that location forever. If the sun and the earth were not…
Recap In the last two posts on what is the 3-body problem and the dynamics of the three body problem I’ve shown you the following GIF with a spacecrafts trajectory in the earth moon system. The trajectory is bouncing around what I’ve labeled a ‘forbidden region’. In this post we’ll go over the number behind…
Things Always Come in 3’s If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three. -Laurence J. Peter Lot’s of things come in threes, there’s even a whole website devoted to three’s. Is there a reason we’re fixated on groupings of three? Probably, but that seems like a psychology question and this post is about…
Review of Constants of Integration In Last week’s post we played around with the equation of motion to transform it into forms that we could integrate. Through that we identified 5 different constants of integration. There’s actually also a sixth that I didn’t go over last time called mean angular motion and denoted by symbol, n.…
Introduction of the 2-Body Problem In the last orbital dynamics post I introduced the n-body problem and how there is no general analytic solution. There is a general analytic solution for a simplified version of this problem called the 2 body problem, and that’s what this post, and the next several, will be about. In this…
Series Overview: This series will be a write up of “Source book in Astronomy 1900-1950”. The book is split up into 13 sections with each one covering a different topic in astronomy. My plan is that as I read through each topic I write up the important points and then condense all of my notes…
Introduction to n-Body problem Lots of post on this site begin with an appeal to Newtons second law. It’s an extremely useful tool for analyzing dynamic systems. This post wont begin this way. It’ll begin with Newtons third law. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” This means that anytime a force…
