Spacecraft Flights Animations in Physics Teaching

Abstract

The article deals with animations of spacecraft flights that can make physics lessons more interesting. We briefly introduce the portal Wolfram Demonstrations Project where we have published the animations and which includes a huge amount of (not only) physical animations. We chose missions that used the gravitational assist. These missions are very interesting because the spacecrafts have fly past planets that significantly change the subsequent flight. The research focused on students’ knowledge about these topics showed that students have bad ideas about spacecraft flights. Our animations can very simply eliminate these misconceptions by only the view on spacecraft trajectories.