Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Flight planner support for launch planning #3115

Open
jd284 opened this issue Aug 27, 2021 · 0 comments
Open

Flight planner support for launch planning #3115

jd284 opened this issue Aug 27, 2021 · 0 comments

Comments

@jd284
Copy link

jd284 commented Aug 27, 2021

It would be nice to be able to plan a flight to a defined target orbit even before launching.
For many missions, launching into an approximate parking orbit and then planning the flight is sufficient.
But for more "interesting" missions, the correct parking orbit is not obvious, often requiring large corrections or several relaunch tries when guessed wrong, and sometimes it is quite inefficient to go to a parking orbit first instead of the target orbit directly, like when a low-thrust upper stage cannot easily reach a LEO, or because of orbital precession. Or to reach a lunar NRHO the initial orbit would need to be several degrees away from the lunar plane but it's difficult to guess in just which way.
The way I would like this to work, is that a landed vehicle can access the flight planner, but the first maneuver created would plan the launch in the following way:

  • Maneuver time selects the launch time
  • Original flight vector is the surface vector at that time
  • Maneuver delta-v is then applied to the surface vector
  • If an additional setting could be made, it would be the desired periapsis at launch.

Without the periapsis setting this will create an orbit with periapsis near the ground, and obviously it can't plan the required gravity turn, but these are basically part of every launch and shouldn't be a problem.
However this allows playing with the planned inclination and LAN of the initial orbit and planning the further mission, before launching into the proper orbit, and makes it easier to plan a correction after launch to make the rest of the mission work.
Especially useful for:

  • SSO and polar orbits
  • Missions to larger halo/lissajous orbits
  • Missions to frozen lunar orbits, or rescue mission orbits
  • Direct missions to lunar surface locations
  • Interplanetary transfer planning
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant