One of the disadvantages of being out of college is your free MATLAB subscription goes away. As a result, I’m making the switch to Python. Besides consistently being off-by-one due to zero indexing, I like Python quite a bit. Getting a 4th order RK solver to work was about as intuitive as getting ode45 to … More Getting snake-y
As part of my Master’s degree, I took a Robotics independent study class in my last semester. After 4 years of undergrad and one semester of grad school, I finally got to explore my own completely independent project over the course of a 3 month semester (this was all in early 2017, I’m just getting … More Learning to land
Background My senior design course involved creating a baseline design for a mission to Titan, Saturn’s most well-known moon. We picked Titan because it has amazing potential for breakthrough discoveries from both a planetary science and astrobiology perspective. This is largely due to the methane atmosphere and carbon rich environment. A methane atmosphere means a “methane … More Titan Entry, Descent, & Landing
Been a while, I know. November was brutal. Somehow I have more work despite fewer credits. Built some CubeSat reaction wheels though, which was pretty cool. Also managed to fix up the simulation software a bit more. I added real orbital dynamics this time around. Previously I had been propagating the time from the simulation … More Orbits with Attitude
Its a fall weekend, so some form of football, whether it be college or NFL, is on most people’s minds. But football isn’t the only place where interceptions are interesting. Interplanetary interception trajectories are pretty amazing in their own right. They are the only way for us to actually reach another planet efficiently. For example, if … More Interplanetary Interception
One of the cooler things I learned in the first half of this term is how to plot an orbit in 3D over a sphere representing the Earth. I also salvaged some old code from a friend that would project a map of the Earth over the sphere, so we can see exactly where over … More Show You the World
I’m more hesitant to boldly declare this set of plots a success, but I do think I’m on to something decent here. I’ve modeled the spacecraft with the same inertia properties and initial orientation and velocities that I’ve used before (found in this post). I’ve also given all the reaction wheels the same moment of inertia, 1×10-3 … More Wheel Plots
Reaction wheel functionality is slowly coming along in the attitude dynamics simulator. There’s some interesting changes with wheels that I had forgotten about since torque rods were the focus of pretty much all of my spacecraft simulation work. I’ve done some wheel based control simulations for high altitude balloons, but the scope of that was quite … More Reaction Wheels Rolling
First cut, second post. Last time I mostly talked about the background and inner workings of the attitude dynamics simulation I’ve upgraded. Now I’ll talk a bit more about the advanced stuff that’s included. I mentioned the mechanisms that allow our little CubeSat to orient itself to where we want, and promised to talk about how … More Preliminary Plots 2
Plotspace 
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