Description

poliastro has lots of interesting features for users analyzing interplanetary trajectories, some of which are only present in commercial-off-the-shelf alternatives, such as predefined low-thrust guidance laws, flybys analysis, and more. In fact, the scope of poliastro explicitly mentions interplanetary applications, and we started there because

• It is fun
• There were scripts here and there, but some of them didn’t work well for attractors other than the Earth
• We were too lazy to learn SPICE

However, most potential poliastro users (including commercial companies) are interested in Earth-bound trajectory analysis. This includes:

• Launch windows and orbit injection
• Station-keeping and orbit correction maneuvers
• Precise propagation using high-order gravitational and atmospheric models
• Two-Line Element (TLE) usage
• Orbit determination
• Observation scheduling
• Groundtrack plotting
• And more!

The goal of the project is open-ended and involves improving poliastro for some or all of the above use cases.

Milestones

Coding starts

• Engaged with the community and understand the motivation and challenges of the project.
• Have set up a development environment

1st evaluation

• TBD
• Have all code, tests and documentation in GitHub

2nd evaluation

• TBD
• Have all code, tests and documentation in GitHub

Final

• TBD
• Have all code, tests and documentation in GitHub

Secondary goals

• Fix any bugs that might appear regarding visualization, hyperbolic orbits and so forth
• Review pull requests from other poliastro contributors, including the mentor
• Give a talk about the work at some Python event