Spacecraft Dynamics

A Python package developed from various assignments and projects completed for courses in the Aerospace Engineering Department at CU Boulder.

Features

• Modeling of satellite attitude dynamics
• Support for various kinds of actuators
  • Reaction wheels
  • Variable-Speed Control Moment Gyroscopes (VSCMGs)
  • None (control authority is assumed)
• Support for different control algorithms
• Support for different guidance algorithms

Coming Soon

• Guidance algorithms as the primary interface to the satellite (this is how most 3rd party software uses an ADCS!)
• Orbit propagation
  • Some of the example scenarios fake this by converting propagating spherical coordinates over time and converting them to cartesian (no equations of motion are actually modeled though)

Installation

This package is not on PyPI but you can install it directly from the repository:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Jmiceli17/spacecraft_dynamics.git
cd spacecraft_dynamics

# Option 1: Install directly
pip install .

# Option 2: Install in development mode (if you want to modify the code)
pip install -e .

Quick Start

Documentation

See https://github.com/Jmiceli17/spacecraft_dynamics/tree/main/docs for this package's current documentation.

Examples

See the examples/ directory for usage examples:

• Attitude control simulations
• Actuator configurations
• Orbital scenarios

# Example usage
cd spacecraft_dynamics/examples
python mission-simulation.py

NOTE

If running in WSL2, you will have to install and start XLaunch/VcXsrv (or some other X-server) in order for the plots to display.

Development

For development, clone the repository and create a conda environment:

git clone https://github.com/Jmiceli17/spacecraft_dynamics.git
cd spacecraft_dynamics
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate sc-dyn
pip install -e .

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.