Table of Contents

Project 3: Learning goals

Project 3: Learning Concepts

Project 3: Part C: Geostationary orbit

Carver is impressed with your work, but remains unconvinced by your predictions. He has asked you to write a simulation that models the orbit of the satellite. To truly convince Carver, the simulation should include representations of the net force acting on the satellite, which has a mass of $15\times10^3$ kg. Your simulation should be generalized enough to model other types of orbits including elliptical ones.

Conceptual questions:

  1. What changes can you make to your code in order to put the satellite into an elliptical orbit?
  2. How does the program demonstrate that mass is inconsequential to the model?
  3. Can you think of an alternate way of writing the separation vector between the Earth and the satellite?
  4. In both the Tuesday problem and the Thursday problem we pretend that the moon does not exist - what impact would the moon have in this model?
  5. What change or changes could you make to the code to create a more accurate model?

Project 3: Part D: Geostationary orbit

While you have continued to impress Carver, he remains unsure about the size of the force acting on the satellite and its distance from Earth. He seems particularly concerned the distance of the satellite from Earth not very more than $\pm$ 1%. Graphs of its distance from Earth and the magnitude of the net force acting on it may convince him.

The syntax you need to work with in order to include a graph involves two lines of code(mass of Earth vs time is given as an example). One outside the while loop and the second inside as the variable being plotted on the vertical axis changes with time:

Outside the while loop, add: graphExample = PhysGraph(numPlots=1)

Inside the while loop, add: graphExample.plot(t, mEarth)

Project 3: Part E: Geostationary orbit

Use Glowscript to generate a single graph, plotting both the x-component of the satellite's momentum and the x-component of the net force acting on the satellite as a function of time. If you were not able to complete part B from last time, hand draw a prediction of these two graphs before constructing these graphs using Glowscript.