Ending Thoughts and the Molniya Orbit
Concluding remarks for orbital mechanics and a real-world example.
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This chapter briefly introduced orbital mechanics and used an existing third-party library to model 2D and 3D elliptical orbits with Matplotlib. Third-party libraries are a great way to let others’ expertise guide you along your programming journey. The KeplerEllipse class within PyAstronomy clocks in at about 660 lines of code; we were able to import it and plot an ellipse in about 10 meaningful lines of code. This program is a good learning tool to ...