Personally, I'm not a huge fan of auto-generated documentation; I usually just prefer reading the comments in the header. Since that's just me, this small site contains some library documentation that may be useful.

I know this main page is pretty sparse. There's no point in copying and pasting all the very cool features of perturb from the repo's README when you could just look there.

Go to the perturb repository's main page here for a bunch of useful info on features, installation, and examples.

Basic Usage

Everything in this library is in the perturb namespace. Here's a quick intro to the typical "usage flow".

I won't cover the details of SGP4, but in brief, it's a very popular orbit propagator for Earth-centered spacecraft. Usually, the input orbit ephemeris is through a TLE, such as the ones provided by Celestrek. These TLE inputs can be used to construct a perturb::Satellite object.

A specific point in time is represented as a perturb::JulianDate. You can either construct one from a specific date and time via perturb::DateTime or offset a number of days from the perturb::Satellite::epoch() of a satellite.

Passing in a perturb::JulianDate time point to the perturb::Satellite::propagate method of a satellite yields a perturb::StateVector, which contains a time-stamp, and a position and velocity perturb::Vec3. The vectors are just a std::array<double, 3>, measured in kilometres, and are represented in the TEME coordinate reference frame. The details of this frame can get a bit annoying, so this library does not handle converting it to others. For handling Earth-centered reference frames such as TEME and transformations between them, you may be interested in the gelocus library.

Build Options

See the "Build Options" section of the repository page for more info.

License

The perturb library is licensed under the MIT license.