Adding online capability to draw orbits within posts

Question

This is a long-shot question:

• User Experience SE users can draw Balsamiq mockups in their questions and answers.
• Electrical Engineering SE users can draw schematics.
• Maths and physics sites can use MathJax (I suppose it's the easiest thing to do since MathJax is free) - already covered here (Writing equations (Mathjax and alternatives)).

I wonder if Space Exploration SE could provide its users with the ability to edit/draw orbits within posts.

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Note: Cesium works:

There is an implementation of SGP4 algorithm to be used with Cesium: https://github.com/koansys/isat

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Old ideas transferred from a comment:

Something with 3D was definitely on my mind. D3 is a great example of rich 2D and 3D pure-JavaScript visualizations.

The first implementation idea that I have right now revolves around letting the user experiment with setting parameters for a simple (cough) D3 graph of the Earth and a single sat around it.

Answer 1

This is a tentative list of questions which would benefit from the feature. Please note this is community wiki and can be edited at will.

• Can you tack against the sun using a solar sail?
• Do any launches bypass LEO?
• Why should the James Webb Space telescope stay in the unstable L2?
• What creative orbital maneuvers might I do to save fuel for a geosynchronous spacecraft?
• Will Rosetta have to adjust its orbit around Chury due to the comet's coma and tails?
• Are sun-synchronous orbits possible around any body?

Answer 2

SE does do these for beta sites, but they may not have enough dev time to spare.

If you can do most of the plugin writing, they probably will help integrate it.

What you need is (I'm assuming you're looking for a static plugin that launches an editor to create images like the CrcuitLab or Balsamiq ones, not an interactive plugin like the one on Chess):

• Something that opens Cesium from the markdown editor. SE can integrate this more easily than we can, but for testing you'll need this
• When the user exits the plugin (hitting "save"), an image should be created and uploaded to imgur.
• There should be a backend that keeps track of which image is attached to what content. For example, the Balsamiq editor only inserts an image and some HTML wrapper comments, but you can still re-launch the editor to edit the mockup.

Basically, make it as easy as possible for SE to integrate this.

Answer 3

Two possible issues I see with this:

1. A 2d projection of an orbit can be difficult to understand. Drawing a quick sketch of how a Hohmann transfer works is one thing, getting a clear view of how inclination is taken out of a GTO is quite another.

2. This might become more of a distraction than a help. Thanks to Kerbal Space Program, lots of people understand the basics of orbits (apogee/perigee, inclination), but far fewer understand where other parameters come into play (node, argument of perigee). I think we'd run into the situation in which a user can describe (in English) the orbit he's thinking of, but will not be able to correctly describe it in Keplerian elements, and it just confuses the issue.