Heimdall

Inspiration

The Mars Orbiter Mission launched by India in 2013. The fascinating launch technique used by them to escape earth's sphere of influence and establish mars orbit led us to try and simplify things for the average user.

What it does

Allows you to calculate the velocity needed to establish Low Earth Orbit. Once there at your desired altitude, it helps you understand the velocity needed to maintain orbit along with informing you the orbital time period. It then helps you understand the base of the Hohmann transfer orbit by waiting for the alignment between Earth and Mars. It attempts to calculate the change in velocity needed to get to target planet(Mars in our case).

How we built it

We started with taking a look at the Hohmann transfer orbit and understanding more about orbital paths of planets. We then worked backwards to understand the physics at a higher level. After that we began working at the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. We modified it to account for the atmospheric and gravitational drag. Once we had a solid understanding of the physics and math behind it, coding it out was quite easy. We used Python for its simplicity and highly capable scientific functions and capabilities

Challenges we ran into

One of our key issues was the fact that none of us were particularly experienced orbital engineers and figuring out how to simplify rocket science and orbital dynamics wile retaining the rigour was challenging. We had to simplify a significant number of issue sand derive some equations that were not easily available.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we were able to simplify a hugely complicated science to a fairly simplified yet reasonably accurate value. We also are proud of the fact that we derived an equation that allows you to calculate the changing velocity of a rocket while accounting for the atmospheric drag and gravitational drag. One last accomplishment would be our simple and elegant command line interface that allows the user to interact with the software in a easy manner.

What we learned

We learned that planning for a project can significantly cut down on wasted time trying to fix issues as a result of poor planning. The most important lesson we learned perhaps is to understand more about the topic itself before we come to the hackathon. While we are proud and delighted by what we have accomplished thus far, we think we could have done more if we were more organized coming in.

What's next for Heimdall

We decided that since this was a fairly complicated project, we could not restrict it to this hackathon. Some of our ideas to expand on this include building a simple 2d UI to be more visual and thus more accessible to students of all ages. We would also definitely want on adding more functionality through allowing the user to specify various destination planets instead of just Mars.

Built With

• python