Name

poliastro

Website

https://poliastro.github.io/

Author

Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez <juanlu001@gmail.com>

Version

0.4.0.dev0

poliastro is an open source pure Python package dedicated to problems arising in Astrodynamics and Orbital Mechanics, such as orbit propagation, solution of the Lambert's problem, conversion between position and velocity vectors and classical orbital elements and orbit plotting. It is released under the MIT license.

from poliastro.examples import molniya
from poliastro.plotting import plot

plot(molniya)

poliastro requires the following Python packages:

• NumPy, for basic numerical routines
• Astropy, for physical units and time handling
• numba (optional), for accelerating the code
• jplephem, for the planetary ephemerides using SPICE kernels
• matplotlib, for orbit plotting
• SciPy, for root finding and numerical propagation

poliastro is usually tested on Linux, Windows and OS X on Python 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4, using NumPy 1.9 and 1.10 (single codebase).

Platform	Site	Status
Linux-x64	Anaconda
OS X-x64	Travis CI
Windows-x64	Appveyor

The easiest and fastest way to get the package up and running is to install poliastro using conda:

$ conda install poliastro --channel poliastro

You can also install poliastro from PyPI using pip, given that you already have all the requirements:

$ pip install poliastro

You can also download poliastro source from GitHub and type:

$ python setup.py install

Development installations are also supported thanks to setuptools:

$ python setup.py develop

It is recommended that you never ever use sudo with distutils, pip, setuptools and friends in Linux because you might seriously break your system [1][2][3][4]. Options are per user directories, virtualenv or local installations.

If installed correctly, the tests can be run using py.test:

$ python -c "import poliastro; poliastro.test()"
Running unit tests for poliastro
[...]
OK
$ 

Code contributions are welcome! Just send a pull request and we'll discuss it. In the wiki you can find some documents explaining the overall design of poliastro, and in the issue tracker you may find pending tasks waiting for someone to complete them.

I am one of those that writes bug-free code every single time, but if you think you've found one please refer to the issue tracker on GitHub.

If you use poliastro on your project, please drop me a line.

You can also use this DOI to cite it in your publications:

And this is an example citation format:

Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez et al.. (2015). poliastro: poliastro 0.3.0. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.17462

poliastro is released under the MIT license, hence allowing commercial use of the library. Please refer to the COPYING file.

poliastro comes from Polimi, which is the shortened name of the Politecnico di Milano, the Italian university where I was studying while writing this software. It's my tiny tribute to a place I came to love. Grazie mille!

Development efforts are shifting soon towards the new Python Astrodynamics Project, a joint effort between several developers. In the meanwhile, poliastro will see bug fixes and probably a new releases in 2015 and 2016.