Abstract

A real-time, N-body gravitational simulator and graphical user interface in Unity. The program accesses planetary data from the NASA Horizons database via Telnet. Various complexity-reducing algorithms have been utilised; Optimising the large-scale physics-based simulation.

Background

Excited by the utilisation of programming in support of physics, this project initially started as an old blog article and Excel spreadsheet of mine. The project is a followup inspired by a great Feynman lecture on Newton’s Laws of Dynamics. Read about how I designed and tested the program, as well as the hurdles I had to overcome in its development, in the design document & development log.