Quick Update

Thesis is done and has been defended. Once it has been published I will include a link here. Now I just need to finish the semester and find a job...

A few things have been left out of the thesis analysis since I ran out of time, such at the stability of the comet's rotation and conduction between discretized faces. In time I will include them into the comet simulation and ultimately into SpaceSim, which I plan on restructuring to allow for more modularity and less glitchiness.

I haven't written anything about the satellites interaction with the outgassing jets. Below is a figure of the orbiting satellite, but the body of the text is in the thesis, I don't feel like writing it all out right now. There is also a video that goes along with it, but it isn't optimized since it wasn't needed in the thesis (damn paper not displaying moving images) and I just needed a snapshot (as seen below).

Orbit of a satellite with/without interaction with outgassing jets. 

Other then that, I helped some colleagues develop an app to diagnose anemia by looking at the color of eyes/nails. I did the coding and created a GUI for it, but I can't discuss more then that since there is some no-talking-about-it thing, but it's pretty cool and works well. 

Thesis and things

For the last while I have been hard at work on my thesis, which mainly encompasses what what I have written about. Right now I am sitting at a solid 29 pages (written, 40 total including all the random bull-stuff), with 3 of the 5 chapters are done, with chapter 1 being the intro, 2 is the comet model with sublimating jets and whatnot, and 3 is the dynamic expressions used. The 4th chapter will be the simulated results and the 5th is analyzing a satellite orbiting the comet.

So, I will only talk about the new stuff. 

Going off the last post, I added in a variable shape to go along with the change in inertia and mass. Essentially I just made the face vertices into a variable. It's a little buggy right though. The way it is written, the faces translate, but do not change area. Therefore after many orbits, it becomes very inaccurate. I have been playing around with ways to fix that, like changing the area as a ratio of volume to surface lost, however there are implications for the other faces which use that vertex. So that is going on the back burners for now.

 I also have written a way to describe the outgassing jets, which can be seen in the figures below. 

Left: Density/Pressure ratio throughout the outgassing jet 

Right: Geometry of the outgassing jet

To "get around" the fact that the faces are triangles, a circle of equal area is placed at the center, and is considered the pseudo-face. Beta functions (alpha=beta=2) are then used to describe the distribution through the jet. While the density at the face reaches 150%, it does not make a difference in the far field. It can be remedied with a beta function varying with distance from the face (starting at alpha=beta=1 which is a square wave), but I decided it was more trouble than it is worth. Using these definitions, the effect of outgassing jets on a orbiting satellite can be found with a different simulation I have also been working on, but that results from that are for a different time.