written by Francisco Esquembre

Arenstorf orbits are closed trajectories of the restricted three-body problem. That is, two bodies of masses µ and 1-µ moving in a circular rotation, and a third body of negligible mass moving in the same plane. The computation of these orbits is very sensible to small errors and are a good test for the accuracy of numerical methods for solving Ordinary Differential Equations.

This simulation compares the solution of two of these orbits using both a 4th-order fixed step and a 5(4) variable step Runge-Kutta algorithm. The adaptive solver uses an event to find the period of the orbit and stop there. Both the computations of the adaptive solver and the event are done with the step size and the tolerance indicated.

The Arenstorf Orbit JS Model was developed using the Easy Java Simulations (Ejs) version 5.  It is distributed as a ready-to-run html page and requires only a browser with JavaScript support.

• Download ejss_model_ArenstorfOrbit.zip - 255kb Compressed File

Published August 28, 2013
Last Modified September 30, 2014

This file has previous versions.

This source code zip archive contains an XML representation of the Arenstorf Orbit JS Model.   Unzip this archive in your Ejs workspace to compile and run this model using EJS 5.  Although EJS is a Java program, EJS 5 creates a stand alone JavaScript program from this source code.

• Download ejss_src_ArenstorfOrbit.zip - 85kb Compressed File

Last Modified September 30, 2014

This file has previous versions.