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About

Brahe is a modern satellite dynamics library for research and engineering applications. It is designed to be easy-to-learn, high-performance, and quick-to-deploy. The north-star of the development is enabling users to solve meaningful problems and answer questions quickly, easily, and correctly.

The key features of the library are:

  • Intuitive API: API designed to be easily composable, making it easy to solve complex problems correctly by building on core functionality.
  • Easy-to-Learn: Designed to be easy to use and learn. The objective is to provide clear documentation and visibility into what the software is doing so that users don't need to spend time reverse engineering internal routines and more time solving their own problems.
  • High-Performance: Brahe provides a Python 3.6+ wrapper that is auto-generated from a core Rust library. This provides fast core implementation, while allowing users to take advantage of Python's rich scientific ecosystem if they so choose.
  • Answer Questions Quickly: Brahe is designed to make it easy to code up solutions to meaningful problems. High-fieldity, high-performance APIs are not the end-objective, but helping users solve their problems.

Brahe gets its name from the combination of Rust and astrodynamics (Rust + astrodynamics = Brahe). The library specifically focuses on satellite astrodynamics and space mission analysis. While the underlying concepts have been studied and known since Kepler wrote down his three laws, there are few modern software libraries that make these concepts easily accessible. While extremely well tested, other astrodynamics and mission analysis software can have an extremely steep learning curve, making it difficult to quickly run simple analysis that is known to be correct.

Because of this, students, researchers, and engineers frequently end up reimplementing common astrodynamics and mission analysis tools with unfortunately frequent regularity. While reimplementation of common code can be a good learning mechanisms, in most cases it is both error-prone and costs time better spent on other endeavours. This project seeks to providing an easy-to-use, well-tested library, to enable everyone to more easily, and quickly perform astrodynamics and space mission analysis without sacrificing performance or correctness. The software built in Rust for performance with bindings to Python for ease of use.

The implementation approach is opinionated, the objective is to provide an easy-to-use and accurate astrodynamics library to enable users to quickly and correctly solve most common problem types. it is not practical to try to implement every aerodynamics model and function utilized in practice or historically. Since Brahe is open source, if a specific function is not present, or a different implementation is required, users can modify the code to address their specific use case. This means that Brahe, while we want to continue expanding the capabilities of the module over time, the immediate goal is to provide a well-tested, flexible, composable API to quickly address modern problems in astrodynamics.

One example of this in practice is that the built-in Earth reference frame transformation utilizes the IAU 2006/2000A precession-nutation model, CIO-based transformation. Even through there are multiple ways to construct this transformation, Brahe only implements one. Another example, is that the geodetic and geocentric transformations use the latest NIMA technical report definitions for Earth's radius and flatness. If a desired model isn't implemented users are free to extend the software to address and functionality or modeling gaps that exist to address their specific application.