Orbital, a N-Body Gravitation simulator
It was the Indian Space Agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission that another time picked up my interest: If you have seen their impressive trans moon injection-manoeuvres you get the idea how impressive and interesting such mission-planning can be.
- Implement simple Newton-laws, Euler method
- N-Bodies: Rocket should rotate around Moon, Moon should rotate around Earth, Earth should rotate around Sun
- Implement correct Runge-Kutta 4th order
- Implement simple UI “Cockpit” for zoom & focus-control, visualise interesting data like individual distances, polar-coordinates -> in progress
- Put mission- & object-data from source-code to external JSON-format config-file
- Visualise several interesting cases, eg. Chandrayaan-2, Apollo 13, Voyager 1/2, …
- connect to NASA Horizons-data :-)
NASA and other space-agencies have their own useful and more precise tools like GMAT. Hence, it makes no sense to replace their tools.