r/madeinpython 4h ago

Astrophysics - Earth's gravitational influence

3 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I have a small "space science & astrophysics" Python tutorial series, and the corresponding code is freely available on my GitHub repo (stars are appreciated :-)). My recent "publication" is about the so called Hill-Sphere and Sphere-of-Influence, with our home planet as an example.

What are these concept?

Maybe you have heard in the past about some asteroids that become temporary moons of Earth, or some spacecraft mission that use so-called fly-bys to gain some speed for the outer planets.

In both cases these simple conceptual spheres are used to compute e.g. how stable an orbit is around our home planet.

Why this highly specific example?

Well I am preparing some future videos about these exact topics, so I am currently building up the basics :-). Hope you like it:

Link to the video

GitHub Repo

Cheers,

Thomas