Choose Your Own Adventure #3 (Day 3)
Intro to this Adventure
PRE-ACTIVITY: Make sure you have gone through the code for Adventure #1.
In Adventure #3 you will be plotting the orbits of some actual planetary systems taken with the Kepler instrument. Here, you need to pick your systems (make sure they have measurements of all the parameters you think you need for your calculation... you might have to check other external references - see the "Resources" list for more details on this).
Download the code + sudo-code and see if you can plot the orbits/energies to see how stable these systems are (and how the stability is related to the precision of the timestep).
HINT: If you want to see how to read in & format the Kepler data, you might want to check out how to read in the data from Adventure #2.
Code
Make a planetary system based on Kepler data
Code to read in Kepler data and calculate the position of each planet as a function of time using the Hermite integrator.
Resources
Super Planet Crash!
Can you make a stable system?
Bonus: Orbits Game
Can you please your alien overlords by building them awesome planetary systems?
Kepler Confirmed Planets Table
If you want to grab other Kepler data and play with your own system, check out this table! Note: you will probably have to click on the "default reference" column (which you can display in the "Select Columns" header) in order to get the "time of first transit" if you want to use it in your code and the parameter if it is not listed.
Neat Interactive Tables for Kepler
Also, check out the "Plots" tab here if you in general want to plot Kepler data as stuff vs. other stuff.