Earth-Moon orbit

[ReformedCharacter]

Not an Earth-Moon orbit I know but the Lunar Gateway proposal is for a highly elliptical lunar orbit 70,000km - 2,000km chosen to be always 'visible' to the Earth and Sun. I enjoy Scott Manley's space oriented videos and this one appeared a few days ago with an interesting animation of the orbit. I hadn't heard about the Lunar Gateway before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHtmSL08xPM

RC

[scotia]

As promised - here are the plots of the satellite orbiting round the moon and the earth. ......

The second stable obit was discovered by trial and error - .....

The educational point behind this simulation was to introduce students to the importance of a variable step length integration procedure. I don't know if this message got through - but they enjoyed themselves looking at all sorts of orbits.

Thanks, interesting. Takes me back to Stroud, Engineering Mathematics.

You could extend this problem set to include an optimisation algorithm. It would have to seek quite widely to find the different orbits, and the decision about which optimisation approach to go for might be interesting. A further refinement would be to have a nested optimiser running the Runga Kutta timestep decisions.

regards, dspp

Interesting - I had been thinking about this. Way back 35 years ago a PC would have lacked the power - but even a crude stepping through a likely range should be simple enough to perform on a modern PC. I'll probably give it a go later tonight - after a bit of exercise in my garden.