Award-winning rocket scientist, Thomas S. Logsdon really enjoys teaching this short course because everything about orbital mechanics is counterintuitive. Fly your spacecraft into a 100-mile circular orbit. Put on the brakes and your spacecraft speeds up! Mash down the accelerator and it slows down! Throw a banana peel out the window and 45 minutes later it will come back and slap you in the face!
In this comprehensive 4-day short course, Mr. Logsdon uses 400 clever color graphics to clarify these and a dozen other puzzling mysteries associated with orbital mechanics. He also provides you with a few simple one-page derivations using real-world inputs to illustrate all the key concepts being explored.
Each student will receive a new personal GPS Navigator with multi-channel capability.
For more than 30 years, Thomas S. Logsdon, has conducted broadranging studies on orbital mechanics at McDonnell Douglas, Boeing Aerospace, and Rockwell International His key research projects have included Project Apollo, the Skylab capsule, the nuclear flight stage and the GPS radionavigation system.
Mr. Logsdon has taught 300 short course and lectured in 31 different countries on six continents. He has written 40 technical papers and journal articles and 29 technical books including Striking It Rich in Space, Orbital Mechanics: Theory and Applications, Understanding the Navstar, and Mobile Communication Satellites.
How do we launch a satellite into orbit and maneuver it into a new location?
How do today’s designers fashion performance-optimal constellations of satellites swarming the sky?
How do planetary swingby maneuvers provide such amazing gains in performance?
How can we design the best multi-stage rocket for a particular mission?
What are libration point orbits? Were they really discovered in 1772? How do we place satellites into halo orbits circling around these empty points in space?
What are JPL’s superhighways in space? How were they discovered? How are they revolutionizing the exploration of space?
Course Outline:
The Essence of Astrodynamics.
Kepler’s amazing laws. Newton’s clever generalizations. Launch azimuths and ground-trace geometry. Orbital perturbations.
Satellite Orbits.
Isaac Newton’s vis viva equation. Orbital energy and angular momentum. Gravity wells. The six classical Keplerian orbital elements.
Rocket Propulsion Fundamentals.
The rocket equation. Building efficient liquid and solid rockets. Performance calculations. Multi-stage rocket design.
Modern Booster Rockets.
Russian boosters on parade. The Soyuz rocket and its economies of scale. Russian and American design philosophies. America’s powerful new Falcon 9. Sleek rockets and highly reliable cars.
Powered Flight Maneuvers.
The Hohmann transfer maneuver. Multi-impulse and low-thrust maneuvers. Plane-change maneuvers. The bi-elliptic transfer. Relative motion plots. Deorbiting spent stages. Planetary swingby maneuvers.
Optimal Orbit Selection.
Polar and sun synchronous orbits. Geostationary satellites and their on-orbit perturbations. ACE-orbit constellations. Libration point orbits. Halo orbits. Interplanetary spacecraft trajectories. Mars-mission opportunities. Deep-space missions.
Constellation Selection Trades.
Civilian and military constellations. John Walker’s rosette configurations. John Draim’s constellations. Repeating ground-trace orbits. Earth coverage simulations.
Cruising Along JPL’s Superhighways in Space.
Equipotential surfaces and 3-dimensional manifolds. Perfecting and executing the Genesis mission. Capturing ancient stardust in space. Simulating thick bundles of chaotic trajectories. Driving along tomorrow’s unpaved freeways in the sky.
Comments from Recent Attendees:
"Excellent course. Can't imagine anyone with more knowledge."
Tuition for this four-day course is $2045 per person at one of our scheduled public courses. Onsite pricing is available. Please call us at 410-956-8805 or send an email to ati@aticourses.com.
