Author: roshan
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Interplanetary Interception
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…
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Show You the World
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…
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Coming Attractions
I know, I just went through almost all of October without a single plot or update. I wish that wasn’t the case because I have actually learned some pretty cool stuff (I can now make some sweet 3D orbital trajectory plots), but the semester has been brutal and I haven’t had time to make a…
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Wheel Plots
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…
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Reaction Wheels Rolling
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…
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Pluto Flyby
Awesome video from NASA showing the view from New Horizons as it passed by Pluto last month. Exploration missions are the best!
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Preliminary Plots 2
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…
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Preliminary Plots
Success! For now… The first cut of my attitude dynamics simulator upgrade appears to work. There wasn’t too much substantive change in terms of the control theory in this upgrade – I mostly re-organized the configuration scripts and made them more modular for easy editing and modelling of different spacecraft. I also added a progress…
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One Small Step
I’ve always loved space. I love it so much I’m trying to make a career out of it. I’m making this blog so I have an avenue to talk about what interests me both in the space-world and the general tech-world. I’ll also use this to post some of the cooler plots I end up making…
Roshan Radhakrishnan 