nyx

Nyx is a high fidelity, fast, reliable and validated astrodynamical toolkit library written in Rust.

The target audience is researchers and astrodynamics engineers. The rationale for using Rust is to allow for very fast computations, guaranteed thread safety, and portability to all platforms supported by Rust.

License

The LICENSE will be strictly enforced once this toolkit reaches production-level quality.

Features

Unless specified otherwise in the documentation of specific functions, all vectors and matrices are statically allocated.

Propagation

• [x] Propagation with different Runge Kutta methods (validated in GMAT)
• [x] Convenient and explicit definition of the dynamics for a simulation (cf. tests/orbitaldyn.rs)
• [x] Propagation to different stopping conditions

• [ ] Detect orbital events in other frames (#107)

  Dynamical models

• [x] Multibody dynamics using XB files (caveat: #61) (cf. tests/orbitaldyn.rs)

• [x] Finite burns with fuel depletion (including low thrust / ion propulsion) (cf. tests/prop/)
• [x] Sub-Optimal Control of continuous thrust (e.g. Ruggerio, Petropoulos/Q-law) (cf. tests/prop/closedloopmultioe_ruggiero.rs)
• [x] Solar radiation pressure modeling (cf. tests/srp.rs)
• [x] Basic drag models (cannonball)
• [x] Spherical harmonics (#28)

• [ ] Spacecraft attitude control and some useful optimal control algorithms

  Orbit determination

• [x] Statistical Orbit Determination: Classical and Extended Kalman Filter (cf. tests/statod/twobody.rs)

• [x] Orbit Determination with multibody dynamics (cf. tests/statod/multibody.rs)
• [x] Smoothing and iterations of CKFs (#105)
• [x] Square Root Information Filer (SRIF) (#91)
• [x] An easy-to-use OD user interface (#109)
• [x] Estimation with spherical harmonics enabled (#123)
• [ ] Solar radiation pressure (SRP) parameter estimation (#98)
• [ ] Covariance mapping and estimate frame transformations (#106, #112)
• [x] State noise compensation (SNC) (#85)
• [ ] Dynamic model compensation (DMC) (#86)

• [ ] High fidelity ground station placement (#92)

  Celestial computations

• [x] Orbital state manipulation (from GMAT source code and validated in GMAT) (cf. tests/state.rs)

• [x] Planetary and Solar eclipse and visibility computation (cf. tests/eclipse.rs)
• [x] Light-time corrections and abberations (#88)
• [x] Frame rotations #93

Who am I?

An astrodynamics engineer with a heavy background in software. Nyx relies on the drawbacks of smd, a library I wrote in Go while researching at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I work for Advanced Space (we do really cool stuff).

Examples

Refer to the tests for short examples.

Exporting states to a CSV file

Refer to the test qlaw_as_ruggiero_case_f in tests/prop/closedloop_multi_oe_ruggiero.rs.

Or just run it as: cargo test qlaw_as_ruggiero_case_f --release -- --nocapture

And check the file called rugg_case_f.csv

Orbital Determination - Estimation plots of a Halo orbit using a classical Kalman filter

Note: the Kalman Filtering capabilities have been validated against JPL Monte using a proprietary scenario.

Data to recreate this simulation is deliberately not shared. This just provides an example of what is possible using this library.