Asteroid Behavior in the Earth-Moon System

Modelling and Simulation of the Physical World (ModSim) is one of the first classes we take at Olin and is our introductory programming class. For our ModSim final project, my team wanted to determine the path of an asteroid in the Earth-Moon system assuming it was receiving a lunar gravity assist. Our calculations were performed in Matlab. Our simulation assumed that the only forces in the system were the gravitational attractions of the Earth, the Moon, and the Asteroid. Each simulation would solve for the path of the asteroid in the system using an ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver, and end conditions were either a time-out condition, which indicated the asteroid had entered a stable orbit, a maximum distance condition, where the asteroid left the Earth-Moon system, or minimum distance conditions where the asteroid impacted either the Earth or the Moon.

Our calculations accounted for 1000 different velocity values (0-2000 m/s in 2m/s increments) and 1000 different relative angles of motion (0-360 degrees in 1000 steps) to provide a 1000x1000 matrix of possible outcomes. The simulation was parallel-processed on a machine with 36 threads and error-correcting memory to ensure no floating point errors and to decrease compute time.