by lavalamp » Tue Nov 03, 2015 7:05 pm
I've recently been working on implementing atmospheric models into some orbit software to take account of drag, and thought I'd share this plot.
I used the same 20g and 20 cm^2 (ie: 1 g/cm^2) satellite and the US Standard Atmosphere 1976, and I gave it the slightly (but not overly) pessimistic drag coefficient of 2.4. The initial conditions were for an equatorial and circular 260km orbit, and it completed around 9.4 orbits.
I can relatively easily run more orbits if people are interested in seeing such things, and may run some more myself. So if anyone is curious to know how a certain size/mass/orbit combo performs let me know and I'll crunch the numbers.
Note: The Earth is not to scale (because it's huge), but the atmosphere and orbit track around it are. The blue part is my representation of the atmosphere and extends to 100 km (Karman line), but the full atmospheric model goes up to 1000 km.
- Attachments
-
- spiral.png (75.44 KiB) Viewed 22025 times