What is the Spaceport America Cup? The Spaceport America Cup (SAC) is an international collegiate rocketry competition. Student teams build a rocket that can carry an 8.8 pound payload to either 10,000 or 30,000 feet. This is one of the best collegiate rocket competitions because of their locator at the Spaceport America in New Mexico. Because…
Power Series Approximation A Taylor series is a useful tool in analyzing functions. It allows us to break up those function into an infinitely long, easier to deal with, polynomial. The general formula of a Taylor series is, for some function r(t) Note: The vertical line with a zero at the bottom means evaluate this…
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…
Introduction to GBR If you’re like me, you’ve been getting a deluge of emails about new regulations in Europe kicking into place called the GDPR. Don’t worry, this post isn’t about that. GBR stands for the Gereshes Book Review. I’ve been reading plenty of good engineering/science/math books lately and I’ve wanted to share my thoughts…
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…
Going through undergrad commencement this weekend had me thinking about my time in undergrad and more specifically, those things I chose to carry with me almost every day. I compiled a list with links to where you could find these items on Amazon. What I Carry Starting from the upper right hand corner and working…
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…
Why am I qualified to write this? As I write this post, I’m about to finish my senior year studying aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo. I’ve had three summer internships so far and this summer I have an REU lined up (Note: This coming fall I will be entering Grad school to begin…
