Project description:
This work emerged from a series of lectures created for PHY 420 and my special topics class in Spring 2020, PHY 429/529. This analysis took a deeper look at the orbital dynamics than is presented in many intermediate texts on the subject, and sought to create a series of interesting and challenging problems around the problem of rendezvous, that is, the synchronization of space craft in orbit around a planet. The novelty of the method presented is that it uses a primarily geometric and algebraic representation of the problem in an effort to reduce the analytical overhead of the problem to better enable student understanding and intuition-building exercises. While the original work considered that one of the spacecraft was on a circular orbit, extensions of this work can consider more varied trajectories. This work remains as potential for students who are interested in more theoretical problems.
Publications:
Interception and Rendezvous
and the orbital interception simulator that accompanies this paper