Orbital Owl

Inspiration

As two Aerospace Engineering majors, we decided to embrace our limited computer science knowledge and make tools for people to learn a topic we enjoy.

What it does

The tool we created is called Orbital Owl, this website gives the user information on how satellite orbits are shaped and the basis of the formation. The team has also included an interactive web app that allows users to experiment with orbits. The Owls built this tool to hopefully give people an inside view of orbital mechanics.

How we built it

The Orbital Owl tool is built with a few tools: MATLAB, ngrok, & Domain.com. The Orbital Owl is hosted on a .tech domain that the team obtained from Domain.com. The interactive app (available for download or web view on https://orbitalowl.tech/) was developed in MATLAB. The app was designed using the MathWorks app designer, the app allows the user to interact with a robust orbital mechanics simulation written in MATLAB. The simulation accounts for two-body dynamics and J2 perturbations, meaning that the simulation is with 90% accuracy of the actual orbit elements. The web app is hosted using a local port on a dedicated server, the server is available to the public through the Orbital Owl site due to the ease of use the ngrok, a tunneling tool offers.

Challenges we ran into

Since our team is fairly inexperienced in this domain, we ran into issue after issue. The task of enabling our software on a local server was fairly complex, with time and patience we were able to solve most of the problems that were experienced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Neither one of us had either made a website before, so we were proud of what we managed to do. The model itself is also quite robust. It uses two-body dynamics and J2 perturbations, which is something that we are certainly other teams did not use.

What we learned

We learned there's a reason companies have dedicated people in the IT role. If we could have gotten the web app to work quicker, we could have produced a more advanced version of our web app. The team also learned the importance of teamwork, with only having two people we had to rush through different stages to finish on time.

What's next for Orbital Owl

The website can be iterated on, perhaps better utilizing the owl mascot as a tool to teach younger users. A section on the creation of the model itself can be added for more advanced users, and the dynamic model can also be expanded indefinitely. Accounting for elements like other planets, and the sun is in the range of possibilities.