poliastro finally landed support for Python 3.9, thanks to the fine folks of numba! Their release candidate already works with the newest Python release, and we've been told that the stable release is around the corner. This means that the next stable release of poliastro will also support it 🚀

On the validation side, Jorge has been working on more enhancements, and we have finally confirmed that our 3D impulsive maneuvers give the same result as GMAT and Orekit! You can read the full details in this blog post.

And finally, we have made some small improvements on the development side, by fixing some continuous integration small failures, reducing the number of warnings in our tests, and other small fixes. Thanks Yash, Dhruv, zkl2, and Souhit!

## Impulsive 3D maneuvers have been validated!

As part of the NumFOCUS small development grants, the poliastro/validation repository has increased its activity in order to reach its main goal: validate poliastro's most complex features against similar software.

One of those features are impulsive maneuvers (Hohmann and Bi-elliptic) when applied to non-equatorial orbits. The absence of numerical results in literature and similar sources, made impossible to test associated pieces of code to impulsive maneuvers for orbits with inclination and spacecraft not placed in periapsis. However, this situation has changed, as they are now validated against Orekit and GMAT.

You can see corresponding pull-request for Hohmann validation and Bi-elliptic validation. Not only that, a continuous integration tool has been setup. This ensures that if any bug is introduced within main poliastro source code, we can detect it and fix it without any problem.

One interesting thing is that …

We got awarded a Small Development Grant by NumFOCUS to validate poliastro against commercial and non-commercial similar applications! 🎉 Jorge started by setting GitHub Actions to trigger the validations automatically, validating our conversion between cartesian and Keplerian elements against Orekit, and is now fighting some discrepancies with Hohmann transfers.

On the development front, while we wait for Numba to release Python 3.9-compatible wheels for our next release, we refactored our Cowell propagator to make the code simpler and more numba-friendly, we tried to merge Eleftheria's implementation of the Escobal method for satellite visibility (and sadly got blocked in the process), and kept working on our analysis of Walker constellations for the OpenSatCom activity. We also engaged with the authors of the awesome numbakit-ode to rewrite our Cowell method using numba, but found some issues along the way and we decided …

## This is an end of an era

Contributing to Poliastro has been an incredible experience for me. Since it was the first time, I've participated in GSOC. And the first time I've ever approached to package dedicated to problems arising in Astrodynamics and Orbital Mechanics. Being part of Poliastro was an exciting challenge that I had to surmount and also an unbelievable opportunity to learn about Space, Math and Physics.

With the thorough knowledge learned, and the feedback from JuanLu and Jorge, I was able to overcome every challenge in my Poliastro's journey. As I had said when I had the opportunity, I am grateful to both of my mentors who accepted me to be part of this exceptional community. :)

# Git-log

What we have achieved in the past three months:

Hey, folks! The last weeks were really exciting getting done an algorithm for ground-track orbit. After long days trying to find the perfect approach for Poliastro, we decided to give it a go bringing to life this paper

# But everything it's not what it seems

Well, we thought it will be quite straightforward but much too learn still I have , right Master Yoda?

So I am not gonna lie to you folks, it wasn't that easy, but as Rocky says, "Every champion was once a contender who refused to give up". So now you are gonna know how we solve it. Game on! First things first, we needed to apply numerical analysis in order to obtain the roots of the equation, because given the complexity of the function, there was no other way around.

So we had to come up …

## On the move!

Hey, folks! Here's Meuge, your usual host from the last few months.

In the last few weeks, we got a little bit of everything, analyzing, coding, and searching for feasible solutions to reach the best result. Therefore, we came up with a new feature in Poliastro's Earth module. The API may change in the future, so be aware by the time you read this. Hence, I bet you might be wondering, what's all the fuzz?

Well, now you can experiment with the new API to compute the visibility of sensors that are on board of the satellites. The FOV, field of view, the question is about meeting mission goals within the limit of a satellite sensor. Given some parameters about the viewing satellite, the fundamental problem related to calculating the field of view is estimating how much of Earth we …

## What we've been working on these days!

Hey, folks! I hope everyone is okay out there. Today, I am going to explain a little bit about Repeat ground track orbits, and the value that lies behind. Orbits with repeating ground tracks play a significant role in space engineering. Ground tracks that repeat according to any pattern have meaningful applications in remote sensing missions, reconnaissance missions, and numerous rendezvous and docking opportunities with an orbiting spacecraft. Since they overfly the same points on the planet’s surface every repeat cycle, such as those studying gravity, the atmosphere, or the movement of the polar ice cap.

So as you might imagine, this is amazing. In one way, the data we consume relies on these orbits. As mentioned before, Repeat ground track (RGT) orbits allows a satellite to reobserve the same area after a repeat cycle.

# So how do we …

## To Infinity and Beyond!

Hey folks! It's been a while, but here I am to keep you posted about what we've been up to these last days.

# What have we been up to?

We began the coding period with a video call with the mentors, as you might already know, JuanLu and Jorge. We got to know each other a little better, and we started to design what was ahead of our path.

But, before dropping any line of code, we first had to think about what would be the best way to integrate the new features to Poliastro community in order to capture the desired requirements from an end-user perspective. After some deliberation, we came up with the idea of adding two new objects.

By now, I hope to have your attention as well as Spock's. So we created EarthSatellite and Spacecraft. Both …

## GSoC 2020, I am going to an adventure!

Hi, you all! Let me tell you something, this is going to be the beginning of our journey together, we are going on to a spatial adventure! Sit tight, and wait for the countdown!

But first, let me introduce myself, my name is María Eugenia, though everybody knows me as Meuge.

# First things first, SPACE? How did we get here?

All began with the big bang, no wait, that's a story for another time. All began in 2019, when JuanLu reached out to the The Fellowship of the ring Python Científico community to informed us that Poliastro would be part of GSoC 2019. To be honest with you, I had just a slight idea of astrodynamics, so I took a big leap of faith and asked JuanLu where I could make myself useful.

The truth is that JuanLu wasn't that …

## New features after GSOC19

GSOC 2019 Edition has almost finished. All along this last three months lots of issues where solved, poliastro 0.13 was raised, new features were applied and of course, new issues and bugs appeared.

The objective of this post is just to collect all the implementations that have been merged during this GSOC and also those that are still required to be done.

• [x] Lambert minor issues were fixed.
• [x] Lambert as Maneuver instances.
• [x] Docs and notebook on previous implementations.
• [x] Trail plotting option.
• [x] Fix minor issues on CI and tests.
• [x] New twobody propagators.
• [x] Maneuver fixes: Hohmann time to pericenter and units bug.
• [x] Atmospheric models: COESA62 and COESA76.

A detailed description and link to the code can be found in the following lines.

### Izzo Algorithm minor errors

Some errors appeared in the minimum …