ENAE601 Astrodynamics, Fall 2026.
Logistics
- Meets Tuesday, Thursday 9:30-10:45 AM in ATL 1106
- and online simultaneously through Zoom; recordings available sometime after each day’s lecture through Panopto
- regardless of section of registration, all students can participate online or in class (subject only to seating capacity in the classroom)
- Course site: ELMS
- Syllabus: go.umd.edu/ENAE601-2026-syllabus
- Some figures shown in class can be downloaded from go.umd.edu/ENAE601-figures
Instructor
- Dr. L. Healy, [email protected]
- Office hours: before class, in the classroom
Course Content
- Astrodynamics is the study of the motion of spacecraft
- for most of the class, the motion dominated by a single gravitating body (Two-Body Problem)
- at the end, the -body problem
- Observations and orbit determination are important for spacecraft navigation, but not included in this course (see ENAE606/788U, spring 2027)
- Some numerical computations can be performed by a Python package that wraps Orekit (www.orekit.org), a
library for astrodynamics
- requires installing Python and a few very common packages (chiefly AstroPy and NumPy)
Textbook
- Howard D. Curtis, Orbital Mechanics for Engineering Students, Revised Reprint 4th Edition (August 31, 2020),
Butterworth-Heinemann
- Paperback ISBN 9780128240250, eBook ISBN 9780323853453
- cited in the notes as e.g. “Curtis (2.83)” (equation), “Curtis section 2.4”, “Curtis Fig. 3.2”
- Other references are introduced when the topic is covered
Grading
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Homeworks (about 7) | 30% |
| Midterm exam, take-home, mid-late October | 35% |
| Project (information forthcoming in October, due at end of semester) | 35% |
- Homeworks and the exam are turned in through Gradescope
Announcements
- 9/22: Homework 2 is due September 30
- 10/6: corrections to the 9/24 lecture (signs on the equinoctial Kepler’s equation, definition of ); see announcements on ELMS and Equinoctial Elements