Spheres of Influence

This is a quick shot at making a library that will compute Delta V numbers using python and best-practices with a class structure.

The goal is to answer questions asked in terms A->B trips. For instance, "what is the velocity to escape Earth's gravity well starting at LEO at 400 km altitude?"

You could put this into Google:

sqrt(2*G*(mass of Earth)/(radius of Earth))-sqrt(G*(mass of Earth)/((radius of Earth)+(400 km))

That will get your answer, but it's a simple quesiton.

Use

Run tests:

py.test soi/test_base.py 

Show parser output:

python2.7 soi/parsers.py

Sources

Planet data dump http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/

Moon data dump

• orbital
  • http://www.windows2universe.org/our_solar_system/moons_table.html
  • inclination:
    • http://nineplanets.org/data.html
• physical
  • http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?sat_phys_par

Some details breaking down these data sources can be found in data/README

Goals

• A python library that will take two locations and find the Delta V between them
• Network resource flow calculator - a numerical illustration of Hop's vision
• Simple website (likely client-side scripting) that can calculate the first goal with selection boxes

I believe all these are very highly attainable, although they will push my own limits to some degree (part of the point). Thus, I want to distinguish them from the next set of goals.

• discrete simulations with time-domain actions within the network model
• A text-based website where users can make accounts and input data to create their own network-defined resource flow numbers
  • Ability to share this with a link
• A time-based website where users can build their time-domain actions in the discrete simulation

Links

To get going diving into the data, I asked this on Space Stack Exchange.

Once I hit 2 or 3 (or 1, I haven't decided yet), I'll bounce this around NASA Spaceflight and possibly some other related communities.