The spacecraft trajectory is defined in terms of a mission, i.e. in addition to defining the spacecraft orbital elements, the time period the spacecraft is in orbit has to be specified as well. A mission can be subdivided in segments, with different orbital characteristics.
Once the mission has been defined, orbital parameters have to be specified for each mission segment. Once this is done, a page with a summary table of the mission segments is presented and the trajectory generation can be started.
The segment and mission lengths and epochs defined in this fashion are used by the environment and effects models that run on a spacecraft trajectory. Hence, these parameters need not be specified when running the models in question. In particular, the radiation sources and effects models use the segment and mission lengths to scale orbit averaged fluxes to segment and mission fluences, or to add dose contributions from trapped particles to those from solar protons (which are defined for the total mission length only).
Four sets of pre-defined directions can be selected by advanced users (for the other users, the default setting parallel to the velocity vector is used):
The Solar radiation pressure parameter is defined as 0.451x10-8 K A/M, where:
It is recommended to produce graphical representations of the trajectory before proceeding with the environment models.
Five different orbit types can be selected:
Finally, for a circular orbit the semi-major axis and the eccentricity of the osculating ellipse are calculated in order to minimise the altitude variations due to the oblate Earth (J2 approximation).
The remaining orbital elements (inclination, right ascension of the ascending note, argument of perigee and true anomaly) are defined in the same way as in the general orbit case.
The mission summary page is skipped when an uploaded trajectory is used.
Pressing the button will start the calculation and bring up the "Results" page.