We selected the mission if their flight was interesting in some way. The interesting thing is the technique of the gravitational assist. We created 13 animations for 15 missions: Cassini, Dawn, EPOXI, Galileo, Juno, MESSENGER, NEAR Shoemaker, New Horizons, Pioneer 10 and 11 (together), Rosetta, Stardust-NExT, Ulysses, Voyager I and II (together).
The animations of tidal effects should help understand better these phenomena. Three animations were created for now: Tidal Forces, One Side of the Moon, Period of Tides.
In these articles you can find more information about the gravitational assist:
In this article you can find more information about tidal forces (especially the influence of the eccentricity of the trajectory of the Moon around the Earth and of the trajectory of the Earth around Sun):
For playing the animations on this website is required the Wolfram CDF Player which you can download for free (click on the image):
A manual that describes the creation of animations of spacecraft flights and we do recommend hints and tips how to control the animations.
Animations of spacecraft flights for downloading - only .cdf files without the data or source codes (click with a right mouse button and choose "Save target as...").
Source files for animations of spacecraft flights - the .nb files of the program Wolfram Mathematica, the animations were created by these files (click with a right mouse button and choose "Save target as...").
Files of coordinates for animations of spacecraft flights - the .txt files which contain the original coordinates downloaded from HORIZONS Web-Interface plus modified coordinates prepared for importing into the program Wolfram Mathematica (click with a right mouse button and choose "Save target as...").
Animations of tidal effects for downloading - only .cdf files without the data or source codes (click with a right mouse button and choose "Save target as...").
Source files for animations of tidal effects - the .nb files of the program Wolfram Mathematica, the animations were created by these files (click with a right mouse button and choose "Save target as...").
If you find any mistakes, something is not working, you have any suggestions to improvement of the website or animations, you have any questions, do not hesitate and contact me.
Acknowledgements
This website was supported by the Charles University Grant Agency (Contract Nr. 341311). We also thank to NASA JPL for providing data on the HORIZONS Web-Interface.
Tomas Franc
Tomas.Franc(at)mff.cuni.cz
http://sirrah.troja.mff.cuni.cz/~franc/
Astronomical Institute of Charles University
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
Charles University in Prague
Prague
Czech Republic
last update: September 26, 2013
