Ground Track Plotter

🎯 Objective Hi everyone,

I thought it would be interesting to include a “Ground Track Plotter” in the module of poliastro.plotting. It works in the same way as the other functions of this module: you just have to call a function called groundTrackthat takes as arguments an orbit, labelwith the possibility of using the dark mode.

🖥 Previous figure tries to plot the following orbit:

#PLOTING GROUND TRACK
from poliastro.plotting import groundTrack 

r = [-6045, -3490, 2500] * u.km
v = [-3.457, 6.618, 2.533] * u.km / u.s
ss = Orbit.from_vectors(Earth, r, v)

groundTrack(ss, dark=True)
plt.show()

Till here everything works as it should. However, once I pass the function an Orbitobject, I obtain really strange ground tracks:

Notice that horizontal dashed lines are just for plotting Cancer and Capricorn Tropics.

💡 Possible solutions

If the idea is interesting for poliastro community, I will make a pull request but probably will need some help with the conversions between reference systems. I think the problem may be here, since if you try to plot just a latitude and longitude it works perfectly, showing that exact point on map.

Cape Canaveral Coordinates lat = 28.396837 lon = -80.605659

[astrojuanlu]

Hi @FrancescoColombi, glad you like this new feature! Using the orientation of the prime meridian and the rotation rate of the attractor sounds like a good idea for generalizing this, I’ll open a new issue.

[jorgepiloto]

After two years, this feature has been implemented. I think this was one of my first issues at poliastro. Please, if you find any king of bug or would like to extend its functionalities, open an issue or contact developers through official channels 🚀