Mankind’s destiny is amongst the stars. Space based industries such as asteroid mining could become the largest industries in the world with annual profits in the trillions of dollars within our lifetime. For any type of travel or work to be possible in space, an understanding of orbital mechanics is crucial. In space, all objects are in orbit of something. Satellites both manmade and natural orbit planets and moons. Moons orbit planets. Planets orbit stars, and stars orbit the center of galaxies
Pork-chop plot Pork-chop plot is a chart that shows contours of characteristic energy (C3) versus departure and arrival dates. The Pork-chop plot is essential to determine the initial launch parameters. Pork-chop plot is the graphical representation of lambert solution. Pork Chop plot of Earth-Venus trajectory (from Leela O’Brien, 2012) Tisserand Graph Tisserand graph is a very useful tool to investigate the feasibility of gravity-assist transfer trajectories. The Tisserand graph is the plot of
Spacecraft Dynamics and Control! It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year that I had the understanding to appreciate the beauty of the discipline. It was this year when I was recruited as a student member of India’s first twin-nanosatellite student project, STUDSAT-2 (STUdent SATellite), under Attitude Determination and Control Subsystem (ADCS). Satellites are complex systems designed around a mission objective with capabilities to sustain harsh environment of outer space. More often than not
Gottfried Liebniz was known as the last “Universal Genius” until Mr. Fitterer was born that is, but I am assigned to write this essay about Leibniz. Leibniz had many achievements in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. A French philosopher named Denis Diderot was even stunned by some of Leibniz’s work, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What
Space debris: the accumulation and collection of trash left in orbit. Space debris is also referred to as space junk, space waste, orbital junk, orbital debris, and space trash. Space junk consists of nonfunctional satellites, old pieces of spacecraft, bits and pieces of booster rockets, lost equipment, and other pieces of garbage. Subsequently, space debris is put into several categories, including but not limited too large and small as well as high and altitudes. All the space debris travels all