How we can find X and Y from spherical coordinates! No need to read this if you're not up for doing math today, but it can be an fun read if you're particularely interested :)
Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you get to die in space!
We talk big about traveling to space and seeing all sort of cool stuff. But most people don't send a rocket to space and just let it float wherever, they have a specific goal in mind. Ours is to successfully land on a planet (besides the one we left from)!
As we imagine soaring through our solar system we can't help but to turn our gaze on the far away lights of distant stars and wonder, are we alone? You know- except for each other.
You've probably noticed in the last post that we made a rather large simplification when we said that we'd ignore the gravitational force of the planets on the star. We know it's frustrating take your first physics class and hear the words 'we'll ignore...' a billion times, when you really do want to know everything in detail! While there are reasons for making simplifications, let's have a quick look at how our star behaves when we let the gravitational force of one planet affect it (still no gravitational force between the planets - sorry guys, we're doing all we can with computers we have to fund ourselves!).
The best way to explore a solar system succesfully? You gotta planet.
Turns out space is really, really big.
"Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics."
- David Goodstein, "States of matter"
Hi all! Our names are Marie and Semya, and we are two physics students on our third semester.
After studying physics for a whole year, we finally figured we had all the knowledge we needed to reach our completely reasonable and achievable goal of launching a rocket into space. Unfortunately we've realized that it isn’t as simple as to have a quick look in our basement for the mandatory rocket that we figured all physicists have stored away under a couple of particle accelerators, and so we have to start from scratch.
We hope to take you all on a journey through an unexplored solar system, land on a planet, and maybe even learn some things along the way, but first we have to get off the planet we're already on!
