Ten aeronautical engineering students participated in Dr. Riley Fitzgerald's eight-week online module “Astromechanics.” Some of them want to work in the space industry after graduation and they saw this as an opportunity to expand their expertise and gain insights into a field that is not taught at HAW Hamburg. The class is designed to provide an introduction to the main concepts, intuition, and mathematics governing orbital mechanics and spaceflight in Earth orbit and beyond. It covers topics including Kepler’s laws, orbital elements, orbit prediction, launch, satellite manoeuvring, and even interplanetary missions.
After four semesters of aeronautical engineering studies, Johannes Biber found the change from a pure aviation focus refreshing: ‘The course had a great balance of difficulty and new concepts and gave a good picture of simple orbital manoeuvres and contexts. You can feel Prof. Fitzgerald's enthusiasm for this topic even through the camera, and at the same time he knows how to explain complex concepts in an easily understandable way.’
The module consisted of weekly asynchronous online lectures as well as synchronous discussion sessions and homework assignments to practise the theoretical content. At the beginning of each week, two 50-minute lecture videos and an exercise were published. At the end of the week, there was an online office hour with Professor Fitzgerald, during which students could ask questions about the videos and the homework assignments. The weekly assignments were graded and then discussed in the next weekly online session. Inga Braack really liked the format: ‘I found it very convenient that I could work with the study material on my own through the videos but that there was also a Zoom session where sample problems were solved and questions could be asked. I also found the contact with Professor Fitzgerald very positive.’
