Hey folks! It's been a while, but here I am to keep you posted about what we've been up to these last days.

What have we been up to?

We began the coding period with a video call with the mentors, as you might already know, JuanLu and Jorge. We got to know each other a little better, and we started to design what was ahead of our path.

But, before dropping any line of code, we first had to think about what would be the best way to integrate the new features to Poliastro community in order to capture the desired requirements from an end-user perspective. After some deliberation, we came up with the idea of adding two new objects.

By now, I hope to have your attention as well as Spock's. So we created EarthSatellite and Spacecraft. Both of them would be vital to develop what's coming next for Poliastro. Did someone say TLE?.

Still, you might want to check out EarthSatellite propagation considering J2's perturbation and the atmospheric drag. Sounds superb, right? In order to use it you might want to try:

from poliastro.earth.atmosphere import COESA76
from poliastro.bodies import Earth
from poliastro.earth import EarthSatellite
from astropy import units as u
from poliastro.twobody.orbit import Orbit
from poliastro.earth.enums import EarthGravity
from poliastro.spacecraft import Spacecraft


tof = 1.0 * u.min 
ss0 = Orbit.from_classical( Earth, 1000 * u.km, 0.75 * u.one,  63.4 * u.deg, 0 *u.deg, 270 * u.deg, 80 * u.deg)
C_D = 2.2 * u.one  # dimentionless drag coefficient
A = ((np.pi / 4.0) * (u.m ** 2)).to(u.km ** 2)
m = 100 * u.kg 
spacecraft = Spacecraft(A, C_D, m) #we create the spacecraft
earth_satellite = EarthSatellite(ss0, spacecraft)
orbit_with_atmosphere_and_J2 = earth_satellite.propagate(tof=tof, gravity=EarthGravity.J2, atmosphere=COESA76())

Nevertheless, this API is subject to changes, so before diving in, verify the documentation :)

See you in the next post, and stay safe :)