Help with celestia

[Tzar]

Hello every one, I have just started using celestia. I want to create a movie or a stimulation of satellite travelling to venus by Hoffman transfer and orbiting venus. Can any one please help me out with it? how it works?
thankx
~Tzar

[selden]

Tzar,

What's your background in this? How much do you know about celestial mechanics?
It's hard to determine what way to respond without knowing that.

Have you read the Wikipedia page about them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit

Have you seen the Web page http://home.att.net/~ntdoug/smplhmn.html ?
It calculates many of the values associated with Hohmann orbits in the Solar system.

An issue is that many introductions to Hohmann orbits discuss a transfer between circular orbits that are in the same plane. That's relatively easy to do. However, the orbits of real planets are neither circular nor coplanar. This complicates things substantially.

A utility that I've found useful is SwingBy from JAQAR. It calculates the points along a Hohmann orbit between planets. That file can be edited so it can be used with Celestia as an xyz trajectory. It doesn't do the orbit around the destination, however. I have yet to find a program which does that.

Some comments about using SwingBy with Celestia are at
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 13#p110413

[Chuft-Captain]

The JAQAR site referred to from that post appears to be no longer available.

HTTP Error 404

Regards
CC

[selden]

CC,
Thanks for the heads-up.
Apparently they've completely reorganized their Web presence.

SwingBy is now available at
http://www.jaqarsoftware.com/swingby.html

I've updated the other post to include the new URL.

[Tzar]

Thankx for your reply,
I am currently studying Aerospace Engineering and I have a project for Astrodynamics. I have a good idea about Hohmann's transfer. The transfer will take place in the same plane i.e. not x, y , z plane.
I shall go through the following site and see if i can find sme thing.
http://www.jaqarsoftware.com/swingby.html

Thankx once again,
Tzar.

[selden]

Tzar,

SwingBy is intended for calculating transfer orbits among the non-coplanar planets of the solar system, using high precision ephemerides. I fear it won't let you specify coplanar origins and destinations that you design.

There are some astrodynamic software libraries available from various sources that might help, but I don't know how much you're supposed to be calculating yourself.

* IAU initiative: "...authoritative set of constants, algorithms and procedures that implement standard models used in fundamental astronomy."
SOFA Libraries Issue 2009-02-01 (Fortran & C versions)
http://www.iau-sofa.rl.ac.uk/2009_0201.html
Standards Of Fundamental Astronomy
http://www.iau-sofa.rl.ac.uk/
* Starlink Project
http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/software/starlink/index.html
* Java Astrodynamics Toolkit (JAT)
http://jat.sourceforge.net/

ORSA: Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis
http://orsa.sourceforge.net/index.html

(These were all taken from my Celestia Resource page at
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/index.html )

Please keep us informed about your progress. It's always fascinating to see how people have used Celestia for their projects.

[Tzar]

hello Selden,
I am very impressed by your reply, I think I found what i want. Thank you very much. Yes i will post my progress

~Tzar

[selden]

Tzar,

I'm glad it helped.

Have fun!