barthpaleologue / orbitalstudy

Study about orbital mechanics

The goal is to create a simple algorithm to create procedural solar systems implementing elliptical orbits and planet satellites.

Newton

Online demo here: https://barthpaleologue.github.io/orbitalStudy/dist/newton.html

In this simple simulator we create physical bodies around a central sun, and give them tangential velocity to give them near circular orbits :

Documentation : https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Circular_orbit#/Velocity

And then we apply Newton's second law to make them move :

Yet it comes with a few drawbacks : orbits with a lot of bodies are very unstable and you have to run the entire simulation to know the position of a body at a time t. So we have to try something else.

Kepler

Online demo here: https://barthpaleologue.github.io/orbitalStudy/dist/kepler.html

We are trying to solve this equation describing the orbit of a body :

We can't solve it exactly for E so we use approximations like Newton's method. Then we compute the orbital period using this equation :

Documentation : https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_motion#/First_law

This project has been created using webpack-cli, you can now run

npm run build

or

yarn build

to bundle your application