LAST UPDATED: 10 January 2022
FIRST RELEASE: v0.3
The Earth Observation scenario uses a Nadir pointing spacecraft software to control the reaction wheels in the spacecraft to track the Earth. The software use the centre of the Earth's gravity body to track the position of where it should point towards. In this example, the LandSat8 spacecraft model is shown with a realistic helio-synchronous orbit.
The Custom Observation Spacecraft inherits from the BskSpacecraftPlus class, and is configured using Blueprints. Information on how the spacecraft is configured can be found in the following document:
A video tutorial on how to design a Nominal Editor level is shown in the Building Levels document. Follow this tutorial first before appending code to it for the Nadir pointing case. All code to build a simple level with some basic UI is shown in that document.
The Custom Observation Spacecraft takes in a reference to the target body (the name of the planet that the craft will point towards), the mass (in kg) of the craft, the moment of inertia (MOI) of the craft, the centre of mass vector, an alignment vector (to position the camera correctly) and a set of PID constants for the reaction wheels and feedback system. The Integrator Time Step is used for integration settings and can be left empty.
Alternatively, we can use a specific Earth Observation spacecraft which is preconfigured with the correct properties which can be added like so:
