Introduction: Solar System Simulation

For this project I set intent on create a simulation of how gravity affects the motion of planetary bodies in a solar system. In the picture above\, the Sunshine physical structure is represented by the wire mesh orbit, and the planets are indiscriminately generated.

The motion of the planets are based on real physics, the Law of Universal Gravitational attraction. This constabulary defines the gravitation exerted along a mass by another mass; in this case the Sun on all the planets, an the planets on each other.

For this project I used Processing, a java founded programming environment. I as wel used the Processing example lodge that simulates gravitational force of planets. All you will take for this is the Processing software and a computer.

Step 1: 2 Dimensional Simulation

I began by watching some videos along how to go some coding this that Dan Shiffman created on his YouTube Channel, the Coding Train ( Part 1/3). At this point I thought that I would utilize recursion to generate the solar system, similar to how Shiffman does only using the laws of physical science.

I created a planet object that had 'children planets', WHO in turn too had 'child' planets. The inscribe for the 2D simulation wasn't destroyed because I didn't have a avid path to simulate the attraction forces for each planet. I pivoted from this elbow room of thinking, in a direction based happening the in-well-stacked processing exercise of gravitational attractive feature. The progeny was that I needful to count the gravitational push from all the other planets on each planet, only couldn't have in mind how to pull the information of an individual planet easily. After seeing how the Processing tutorial does it, I realized exactly how to do information technology using loops and arrays or else

Step 2: Taking Information technology to 3 Dimensions

Using the example code for Planetary Attraction that comes with processing, I started a new programme for a 3D pretending. The major remainder is in the Planet year, where I added an attraction operate, that calculates the gravitational force between two planets. This allowed me to assume how our star systems works, where the planets are not just attracted to the insolate, but also to every other planet.

Each planet has randomly generated characteristics such every bit the mass, radius, initial itinerary velocity, etc.. The planets are solid spheres ans the Sun is a wire-mesh celestial sphere. In addition, the camera placement rotates around the sum of the window.

Abuse 3: Using Real Planets

After I got the framework for the 3D simulation shoot down, I used Wikipedia to find the actualized planetary data for our star organization. I created an array of planet objects, and input the concrete data. When I did this, I had to descale pop all of the characteristics. When I did this I should have taken the actual values and multiplied by a divisor to scale down the values, instead I did it in units of Earths. That is I took the ratio Earth's value to the other objects' value, for example the Sun has 109 times more mass that the Globe. Withal this resulted in the sizes of the planets looking too large or too small.

Step 4: Final Thoughts and Comments

If I were to continue working on this simulation I would refine/improve a couple of things:

1. Prime I would scale everything uniformly using the same scaling factor. So to better the visibleness of the orbits, I would lend a chase after behind each satellite to see how apiece revolution compares to the premature one

2. The camera is non interactive, which means that voice of the orbits are off the sieve, "behind the somebody" viewing. There is a 3D camera library called Peazy Cam, that is misused on Part 2 of the Coding Train's video series on this topic. This program library allows the viewer to rotate, pan, and zoom the television camera so that they would be able to follow the entire orbit of a planet.

3. Finally, the planets are currently undistinguishable from each other. I would like to add 'skins' to each planet and the Sun, so that viewers tin recognize Earth and such.

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