How do I animate a 3d plot of a satellite orbit given its' orbital parameters.

The plot function that made is the following:

function plotOrbit(a, e, i, OM, om, mu)
    % a, e, i, OM, om are the orbital parameters
    % mu = 3.986*10^5 (Earth's gravitational parameter)
    
    r_vect = [];
    v_vect = [];
    
    for th = 0: 0.01: (2*pi + 0.01)
        % par2car is an .m file that uses the orbital parameters to obtain
        % the position and velocity vectors.
        [rr, vv] = par2car(a, e, i, OM, om, th, mu);
        r_vect = [r_vect; rr'];
    end
    plot3(r_vect(:, 1), r_vect(:, 2), r_vect(:, 3))
end

I would like to have a moving point along the orbit which varies it's velocity over time.

[Henrique Chaves]

@E. Miguel Reiner Santos Sorry for bother you, but i want to make something similiar to you.

Can you make available your code please?

Thanks !

Answer 1

[Srivardhan Gadila]

You can refer to the documentation of plot3, pause, Specify Axis Limits, hold & figure.

The following is the example code based on the above functions:

1. If you want the point moving i.e., new point to appear and previous point to disappear:

figure
for i = 1:10
    plot3(i,abs(sqrt(100-i^2)),5,'o');
    xlim([0 10])
    ylim([0 10])
    zlim([0 10])
%     hold on
    pause(1)
end 
% hold off

2. If you want all the previous points to appear in the plot as well:

figure
for i = 1:10
    plot3(i,abs(sqrt(100-i^2)),5,'o');
    xlim([0 10])
    ylim([0 10])
    zlim([0 10])
    hold on
    pause(1)
end 
hold off

Answer 2

[Matteo Marzorati]

you can use Matlab function comet3(X,Y,Z), where the 3 inputs are the vectors that define the orbit