Outline¶
- Introduction
- Osculating orbits and celestial ephemerides
- Working with public satellite orbital data
Who am I?¶
- Aerospace Engineer with a passion for orbits 🛰
- Chair of the Python España non profit and co-organizer of PyCon Spain 🐍
- Former Mission Planning & Execution Engineer at Satellogic 🌍
- Currently Developer Advocate at Read the Docs
- Free Software advocate and Python enthusiast 📚
Follow me! https://github.com/astrojuanlu/
1. Introduction¶
What is Mission Analysis?¶
"Mission analysis" is the analysis of satellite orbits to determine how best to achieve the objectives of a space mission. This is performed during the entire definition, development and preparation phases of each project.
(Source: http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bulletin134/bul134b_schoenmaekers.pdf)
If it's so simple, why all the fuss?¶
- Difficult to measure: these things move at around ~8 000 meters per second (Athens-Thessaloniki in one minute) and GPS precision is not that good
- ...But great accuracy is required!
- Many perturbations: the Earth is not a sphere, the Moon is very close, the sunlight pushes the satellite...
- If you lose contact with the satellite, it's a needle in a haystack
Some (alternative) tools for Mission Analysis¶
- AGI STK https://www.agi.com/products (commercial)
- GUI with scripting capabilities
- Most powerful tool in the market
- Also most expensive one, and closed source
- Orekit https://www.orekit.org/
- Java library
- Mature, widely used
- Not so focused on interplanetary applications
- SPICE https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html
- C, FORTRAN, IDL, MATLAB, Python... libraries
- Battle tested collection of functions
- Generating the kernels requires some expertise
- GMAT https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/
- GUI with scripting capabilities
- Closest open source competitor to STK
- Sometimes unstable
- poliastro https://docs.poliastro.space/en/stable/
- (Pure) Python library
- Optimized for ease of use and contribution
- Less powerful than the alternatives
🖤🖤🖤 Python 🖤🖤🖤
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 8, 2018
Shall we begin? 😉