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I hope that this page has been useful in helping you to have a better understanding
of orbits and the parameters that describe them. Hopefully, you had
a chance to experiment with some of the programs, and now have a better
idea of how to look at orbits and see them in your head. My goal
was to provide a few basic ways of visually interrogating the different
aspects of orbital paths and satellite positions.
The first way: 2D visualization, constrained the picture to looking at the ecliptic plane (the plane containing the orbit). This simplified image was useful for taking out some of the information, and allowing the viewer to clearly see the shape and size of the orbit. The next method: 3D visualization, presented the most information about the orbit, and more importantly, gave the viewer a good idea of where the orbit and satellite position were in the three dimensions of space. The last technique: satellite tracking, made use of some very interesting software to see where exactly the satellite was over the earth.
The choice of this project's subject was motivated by a class at Virginia
Tech entitled 'Astromechanics,' which is usually offered in the fall (AOE
4134). MatLAB was the software that was used for most of the homework
and projects, and thus I wrote the visualization programs in this language
for integration with future classes. My professor was Dr. Chris Hall,
who has a lot of resources and information links at his
web page. Two other great sources of information in this area
are NASA and JPL.
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| Introduction | Background | Basics | 2D Viz | 3D Viz | Tracking | Conclusions |