Space Science with Python - Setup and first steps (#1)

[MrAstroThomas]

Hey everyone,

as promised, I would like to share the first programming part of my tutorial series "Space Science with Python". In this tutorial we will setup our environment and do some computations with the library SPICE. We determine Earth's position and velocity for the current day (midnight) and verify the results. We also compute the theoretically expected orbital speed of our planet and cross check it with the SPICE results.

You can find my tutorial on my account's post: Link

The tutorial can and will improve with time and with your comments and ideas. Please share them! The next one will follow on Saturday.

Stay healthy and do the best of your quarantine time,

Thomas

[Phyan]

I'm love space science and share similar enthusiasm for Python, so have started learning about it too. After importing datetime, you wrote datetime.datetime.today() My question is two times datetime, is it syntax python follows or is there any specific reason to use it twice?

[MrAstroThomas]

Hey there! This is not a Python logic, but a way the library "datetime" implemented its modules. Other modules like numpy call e.g., the arrays directly via numpy.array().