Cynthia Vaskis
SLM521 Spring 2004
Dropin3 Assignment
Answers3.htm
Answers
1. Geosynchronous (geostationary) and
telecommunication satellites.
2. No, it merely moves the vector from one place
to another.
3. Find its magnitude by using Pythagoreon’s theorem and by taking the square root of (X*X
+ Y*Y + Z*Z).
4. The Dot Product which is the multiplication
of two unitized vectors.
5. The Cross Product function creates a third
vector using the right hand rule.
6. A matrix rotation must be computed for the
space object and the whole space object must be rotated to allow the Star
Tracker to see the newly selected star.
7. There are approximately 50 or so brightest
stars in a star catalog although this number may vary according to the range of
coverage wanted in the star catalog which depends on what its use will be.
8. The two angles are the angle of right
ascension and the angle of declination (a range of -90 degrees South to +90
degrees North).
9. The word “magnitude” means the “brightness”
of a star according to what type of detector was used to record its brightness.
10. Some answers might be “cruise missiles”,
“nuclear warheads” that have programmed targets and onboard tracking math
algorithms, and military “scouting devices” that fly over the battle field to
see what is happening there. There are
many other possibilities such as radar scanning patterns were the radar has to
go through a search pattern and be pointed in a certain direction requiring a
math algorithm to compute the pointing angles.
Any example of a computer trying to point an object will require the
knowledge of vectors and matrices.
Robotics uses some kind of math algorithm to make a robot follow an internal
map or layout of a building’s floor plan and produces 2D rotational matrices
that send data to the robot’s ambulatory motors to control the direction the
robot moves.