I am very happy that you folks are showing interest but I am also terrified because this thing is definitely not ready for primetime, yet.
The discerning astrodynamicist and/or rustacean will surely find things which are less than optimal or plain wrong.
I am also preparing for a trip so I won't be able to monitor this thread closely but I'll try to answer question wherever I can.
Can I build a solar system simulator with this? Looking for calculating the absolute positions of planets and moons with the sun at 0,0,0 given a datetime. Kepler calculations for planets, moons etc would be fine, as long as I can insert arbitrary objects and calculate their trajectory using gravity. Can this project do that?
We already have the possibility to get positions of celestial bodies with very high precision via JPL ephemerides but you would have to write and integrate your force model yourself.
Hey, this is really impressive stuff, talk about a dream job! Two quick questions if you find the time+interest:
1. What does "safe" imply? Type safety, maybe? Or just a general synonym for "few bugs/well tested"?
2. What kind of industry is this primarily envisioned for use in...? I have experience in the satellite industry (GRE and TT&C) but I was surprised to not see the usual buzzwords on this page, namely "TLEs". I get that it clearly does way more than terrestrial orbital work, but AFAIK that's, say, 99.9% of the current space industry.
In other words: is this library for ESA missions??? That would be rad as hell, if so.
also P.S. I love AI art compared to most, but I would def recommend carving out that cool crab and putting on a background of real stars. As you may or not be aware, many scientists have been a tad radicalized about AI, and AI art in particular -- would be a shame if that slowed adoption of a cool project!
Ground Receiving Equipment, Telemetry, Tracking, & Control, and two line rlement sets. Apparently everything you need to predict orbits of a satellite are contained inside TLEs metadata and is considered a good way to share orbital information between disparate parties.
Heh, you actually highlight a funny frustration from my time there: TLES technically has a capital "S" too, but it's basically always discussed in the plural -- so I would very frequently forget to capitalize the "S" to the veterans' chagrin. Clearly, I haven't shaken the habit!
In hindsight, I guess it's the industry's fault for not pronouncing it "Tee Ell Eee Esses"...
EDIT: And I appreciate the explanation, personally! That's the best part of HN. To be clear to passers-by, a TLES is a string of characters that describes the orbit of a single satellite (artificial or otherwise) based on its position & momentum at some given start second. They have to be updated pretty frequently to account for gradual stochastic drift, which is both an interesting technical problem and a compelling philosophical metaphor.
It is kind of sad to be living where it's too early to have your own space craft. It is sci-fi at this point anyway to consider life like that, but that would be cool to write software for like car CAN bus. But I also get it's not a toy/matter of life and death. I guess a video game or simulator is the closest thing. Standardized APIs for thrusters or something that would be cool.
People can't even afford the cars they finance. Having your own plane is extremely rare. Even if you COULD have your own space craft, they would be more rare than owning a plane.
The spacecraft mechanics in sci-fi who are born today are auto gearheads. It is funny to think about something so romanticized where the modern day equivalent is comparatively mundane. At least, it is to me, I'm sure a lot of people spending their life on it do not find it mundane at all.
I pay Firestone to do my oil change lol, it's pretty sad, I like driving fast cars but don't work on em
I think the anime Cowboy Bebop has influenced my mind on what it could be like again fantasy but yeah. Mix of older looking hardware seems more tangible like this interface
My dad bought a Belite ultralight aircraft. It arrived with the propeller too long so he damaged the motor the first time he booted it up. Rather than fixing the struts and wheels, they fucking cut the propeller shorter. The left wing was 3" longer than the right wing. It is an Italian motorcycle engine.
You might try to Google belite because that sounds awesome, right? My dad told Mr he was selling the plane when he got it back from belite, but decided to fly it one last time.
The engine failed at like 1000' after takeoff and piledrove him into some poor bastard's farm a quarter mile from the airport. The fucking plane could not even glide.
Random ass people driving is bad enough. I have dozens of gigs of dashcam videos of all manner of insane, mad, evil, stupid, degenerate driver in my more recent 100,000 miles traveled in the US.
It will probably never be feasible to have "your own" spacecraft like we have cars. The time and distance scales are just way too huge. Something more resembling the scale of a superyacht might become possible in the far future.
My understanding is there is not a such thing and humans, if we want to go interstellar, are going to have to accept that those humans and probably all their offapring are gone forever.
Yet. Or, as the good science communicators like to say, "as far as we know / as far as our current understanding goes". Looking back in history, almost everything we're taking for granted today was both dreamed by the pas era's "futurists" and deemed impossible by their skeptics. Only time (hah!) will tell, I guess.
A textbook covering the physics of spaceflight, "Astronautics" by Ulrich Walter, was made available for free download by the publisher during the COVID lockdown.
LOX is apparently MPL, so a bit easier to work with than Nyx' AGPL, but still at odd with the MIT/Apache2 combo that has become the norm in the Rust world.
Pardon my ignorance, but how does lox relate to Pisces? I don't get the connection with cancer either, but the first thing that comes to mind on hearing Lox is liquid oxygen as it is used in rockets. So it's a connection between Rust language and astrodynamics. Is there something that makes Pisces more appropriate for this?
Oh, hi! Project creator here.
I am very happy that you folks are showing interest but I am also terrified because this thing is definitely not ready for primetime, yet. The discerning astrodynamicist and/or rustacean will surely find things which are less than optimal or plain wrong.
I am also preparing for a trip so I won't be able to monitor this thread closely but I'll try to answer question wherever I can.
Can I build a solar system simulator with this? Looking for calculating the absolute positions of planets and moons with the sun at 0,0,0 given a datetime. Kepler calculations for planets, moons etc would be fine, as long as I can insert arbitrary objects and calculate their trajectory using gravity. Can this project do that?
We already have the possibility to get positions of celestial bodies with very high precision via JPL ephemerides but you would have to write and integrate your force model yourself.
-
Hey, this is really impressive stuff, talk about a dream job! Two quick questions if you find the time+interest:
1. What does "safe" imply? Type safety, maybe? Or just a general synonym for "few bugs/well tested"?
2. What kind of industry is this primarily envisioned for use in...? I have experience in the satellite industry (GRE and TT&C) but I was surprised to not see the usual buzzwords on this page, namely "TLEs". I get that it clearly does way more than terrestrial orbital work, but AFAIK that's, say, 99.9% of the current space industry.
In other words: is this library for ESA missions??? That would be rad as hell, if so.
also P.S. I love AI art compared to most, but I would def recommend carving out that cool crab and putting on a background of real stars. As you may or not be aware, many scientists have been a tad radicalized about AI, and AI art in particular -- would be a shame if that slowed adoption of a cool project!
1. Safe as in type-safe, memory-safe, and null-safe in contrast to the state of the art which is mostly C++, Java, and tons of ancient Fortran.
2. At the moment, we are using it for speeding up Python code for telecommunications constellation design.
I want to commission a real human artist to design a logo and header image in the future. The AI art is a nice placeholder.
P.S.: I wish this was my day job. I actually had to quit my job at a major aerospace contractor to be able to work on this project.
Ground Receiving Equipment, Telemetry, Tracking, & Control, and two line rlement sets. Apparently everything you need to predict orbits of a satellite are contained inside TLEs metadata and is considered a good way to share orbital information between disparate parties.
Sorry for explaining what the jargon in that comment was, i guess. i did typo "element" as "rlement", i guess i suck.
Heh, you actually highlight a funny frustration from my time there: TLES technically has a capital "S" too, but it's basically always discussed in the plural -- so I would very frequently forget to capitalize the "S" to the veterans' chagrin. Clearly, I haven't shaken the habit!
In hindsight, I guess it's the industry's fault for not pronouncing it "Tee Ell Eee Esses"...
EDIT: And I appreciate the explanation, personally! That's the best part of HN. To be clear to passers-by, a TLES is a string of characters that describes the orbit of a single satellite (artificial or otherwise) based on its position & momentum at some given start second. They have to be updated pretty frequently to account for gradual stochastic drift, which is both an interesting technical problem and a compelling philosophical metaphor.
https://github.com/lox-space/lox/blob/main/crates/lox-space/...
The example code is helpful for seeing how it'd be used (might be cool to link to it from the README while the docs are still todo)
It is kind of sad to be living where it's too early to have your own space craft. It is sci-fi at this point anyway to consider life like that, but that would be cool to write software for like car CAN bus. But I also get it's not a toy/matter of life and death. I guess a video game or simulator is the closest thing. Standardized APIs for thrusters or something that would be cool.
Tie into visual star navigation
People can't even afford the cars they finance. Having your own plane is extremely rare. Even if you COULD have your own space craft, they would be more rare than owning a plane.
Funny I don't even consider hacking on my own car like switching the infotainment system (11 yr old car)
The spacecraft mechanics in sci-fi who are born today are auto gearheads. It is funny to think about something so romanticized where the modern day equivalent is comparatively mundane. At least, it is to me, I'm sure a lot of people spending their life on it do not find it mundane at all.
I pay Firestone to do my oil change lol, it's pretty sad, I like driving fast cars but don't work on em
I think the anime Cowboy Bebop has influenced my mind on what it could be like again fantasy but yeah. Mix of older looking hardware seems more tangible like this interface
https://i.imgur.com/LdWW1sc.jpeg
My dad bought a Belite ultralight aircraft. It arrived with the propeller too long so he damaged the motor the first time he booted it up. Rather than fixing the struts and wheels, they fucking cut the propeller shorter. The left wing was 3" longer than the right wing. It is an Italian motorcycle engine.
You might try to Google belite because that sounds awesome, right? My dad told Mr he was selling the plane when he got it back from belite, but decided to fly it one last time.
The engine failed at like 1000' after takeoff and piledrove him into some poor bastard's farm a quarter mile from the airport. The fucking plane could not even glide.
Random ass people driving is bad enough. I have dozens of gigs of dashcam videos of all manner of insane, mad, evil, stupid, degenerate driver in my more recent 100,000 miles traveled in the US.
It will probably never be feasible to have "your own" spacecraft like we have cars. The time and distance scales are just way too huge. Something more resembling the scale of a superyacht might become possible in the far future.
I understand too until there is FTL/warping space is too big
My understanding is there is not a such thing and humans, if we want to go interstellar, are going to have to accept that those humans and probably all their offapring are gone forever.
> there is not a such thing
Yet. Or, as the good science communicators like to say, "as far as we know / as far as our current understanding goes". Looking back in history, almost everything we're taking for granted today was both dreamed by the pas era's "futurists" and deemed impossible by their skeptics. Only time (hah!) will tell, I guess.
A textbook covering the physics of spaceflight, "Astronautics" by Ulrich Walter, was made available for free download by the publisher during the COVID lockdown.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-74373-8
My hope that this plus Kerbal Space Program would transform my brain proved that I tend to ignore my limitations.
Great book, though.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-74373-8
I work on simulations in a satellite company and have been looking for a way to move out of c++. Thank you very much, will explore this.
Just curious, what kind of simulations do you work on (mission design?) and what libraries would you use in C++?
There is another crate in Rust named Nyx [1] that sounds very similar - an astrodynamics library with a Python wrapper. Anyone knows how they compare?
[1] https://github.com/nyx-space/nyx
LOX is apparently MPL, so a bit easier to work with than Nyx' AGPL, but still at odd with the MIT/Apache2 combo that has become the norm in the Rust world.
There is an older version of Nyx which is Apache licensed
https://github.com/oakwhiz/nyx-space-apache
There is also ANISE made by the same author: https://github.com/nyx-space/anise
Nyx is the OG Rust-based astrodynamics library and much more mature.
Lox started as a vehicle for myself to learn Rust and at that point I did not feel comfortable contributing to an established code base.
The only downside I see is agpl. Im not anti agpl, but truth is this would slow commercial adoption.
With a name like 'lox' you'd think the banner image would be Pisces.
Cool project though, I will definitely be playing around with this.
Pardon my ignorance, but how does lox relate to Pisces? I don't get the connection with cancer either, but the first thing that comes to mind on hearing Lox is liquid oxygen as it is used in rockets. So it's a connection between Rust language and astrodynamics. Is there something that makes Pisces more appropriate for this?
Sibling comment mentioned the connection between lox and Pisces, but the connection to Cancer is that the mascot for Rust is a crab.
True! That's an embarrassing thing to forget, given that Rust is my primary programming language.
I assume they’re making a reference to Lox the food (brined Salmon), so a fish is appropriate.
Think it comes from the german word for salmon, "Lachs", or at least an earlier version of the word.
Swedish is even closer, there it's "lax" [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravlax
I learned about „lox“ in NYC, a native told me it comes from jiddish, which is kind of a german dialect.
Oh! This is the first time I'm hearing about it. That definitely looks like a missed opportunity.
> With a name like 'lox' you'd think the banner image would be Pisces.
It's written in Rust so it's all about the language instead of the mission.
Nah, not really. I sometimes wish that this was all about Rust but as of now the library is mostly being used through the Python wrapper.