AE 370 Rocket Trajectory Simulator

This project is a 2DOF physics-based rocket simulator built in Python, developed for the AE 370 course. It models the vertical flight of a rocket using time-dependent thrust curves, atmospheric effects, and aerodynamic drag, with numerical integration performed via the 4th-order Runge-Kutta (RK4) method.

Features

• Interactive launch interface with ipywidgets
• Real motor thrust curve support via CSV import
• RK4-based trajectory integration with mass depletion and drag
• Output includes velocity, altitude, dynamic pressure, Mach number, energy, and more
• Built-in plotting for all key flight parameters
• Convergence and stability analysis tools to validate numerical accuracy

How It Works

1. The user selects a motor and inputs rocket parameters through a Jupyter interface.
2. Thrust data is interpolated from .csv files in the motors/ folder.
3. The simulation calculates forces and updates rocket state via RK4.
4. Plots are generated to visualize time evolution of physical quantities.

File Overview

File	Purpose
main.ipynb	Launches the simulation UI (Jupyter notebook)
interface.py	Interactive config interface using ipywidgets
simulation.py	Core RK4 simulation logic
dynamics.py	Defines equations of motion and RK4 step
plotter.py	Flight data visualization
thrust.py	Loads and interpolates motor thrust data
motors/	CSV files containing thrust curves
convergence_study.py	RK4 error analysis across dt values
stability_plot.py	Optional: Empirical stability region plot

📊 Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• numpy
• matplotlib
• scipy
• pandas
• ipywidgets
• pyatmos