PRE-ACTIVITY: Make sure you have gone through the code for Adventure #1.

In Adventure #2 you will be plotting the orbits of some actual planetary systems taken with the Kepler instrument. There are links to pre-formatted data for two different systems - Kepler 11 and Kepler 101 - in the "Data" section of this page. The comments in each datafile explain what each column is, what the units are, and where the data points were taken from. The code download example shows how to plot one of these systems with two different approximations about initial conditions.

If you are interested, there are links to the first Kepler paper and those specifically for the systems here in the "Resources" section.

Download the 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).