AEM 3101 Mathematical modeling and simulation

Fall 2016

Homework 2: Due Friday Sep. 30, 11:50 pm.

Your homework must be completed in the form of a single Matlab script (i.e. one
script containing all the problems). Use the Matlab publish command to obtain a
pdf of the script and its output (no other formats will be accepted). Your script
(and pdf) must be named YourLastName_FirstName_HW2.m (and .pdf).
Please submit both the pdf and the m-file on the Moodle site.
Make sure that any value that is asked for in the problems is output by your script
(i.e. that output is not suppressed by a semi-colon).

Homework 2 problems:
Please do the following problems in Gilat, Subramaniam:
A.10, A.17, A.19,
4. Earth satellites move in elliptical orbits that are described by the equation of
path which has the form:
=

(1 2 )

1+ cos

where r is the distance from the center of the planet to the spacecraft, a is
known as the semi-major axis of the orbit, e is the eccentricity of the orbit, and
is the true anomaly which is an angle defined in the figure below. The semimajor axis can be measured in distance units (DU) where one distance unit is
equal to the radius of Earth.
a) Write a Matlab function that takes in as arguments the quantities a, e, and
and outputs the corresponding distance r. Make sure that can be
entered as an array. For a=2 DU and e=0.3 determine r at =0, =.
b) Plot the y coordinate vs. the x coordinate of the satellite to obtain an
elliptic orbit as shown in the figure (use a=2 DU and e=0.3 ). Include a
circular Earth in your plot for comparison. (You can use the command axis

equal so that the x and y axes are scaled in the same way and Earth
appears as a circle.)
c) Plot the orbit for a=2 DU and a few different values of e. How does the
value of e affect the shape of the orbit? At approximately what value e
would the satellite crash into Earth for a=2 DU? (You only need to include
your conclusions in your published script.)
d) Plot the orbit for e=.3 and a few different values of a. How does the value
of a affect the shape of the orbit? At approximately what value a would
the satellite crash into Earth for e=0.3? (You only need to include your
conclusions in your published script.)

Earth

2a