[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

I am looking for a freeware (I'll even go shareware if necessary) program that allows you to design the trajectory of a spacecraft. The software needs to support gravity assists, satellite systems (meaning it would allow for designs say around Jupiter, with gravity assists at the various moons), and for inputing dry and wet mass at launch and the specifics of the launch vehicle. Preferably, but not required, it would support either NAIF kernels or support a launch at some day in the future with the appropriate planetary and satellite positions.

Oh, and preferably, it works on Windows machines, but UNIX/Solaris and Macs are fine.

[Tom Tamlyn]

I'm a little surprised that such tools aren't readily available in a big university's planetary sciences department. Or at least that the folks in the engineering department don't let the planetary sciences people use their facilities. Do JPL and JHUAPL use only proprietary software to plan their missions?

TTT (looking forward to the cool graphics!)

This post has been edited by Tom Tamlyn: May 11 2007, 11:38 PM

[mcaplinger]

Do JPL and JHUAPL use only proprietary software to plan their missions?

JPL uses in-house tools as far as I know. Recently some projects have started using SOAP (from Aerospace Corp) but I don't know what licensing terms it has or what it can do in this area (I've mostly seen it used for visualization.) I've worked on proposals where we used STK's Astrogator (costs big, big bucks). SAIC's Trajectory Optimizer used to come in a cheap demo version that was sufficient to compute delta-v for planetary transfers of various sorts, but I don't see it on the net any more.

I think it's unlikely that a truly usable package that does all this stuff exists for free.