poliastro 0.5, Astrodynamics in Python

[Juan Luis Cano]

Hello all,

I am very pleased to announce poliastro 0.5.0, a MIT licensed, pure 
Python library for studying Orbital Mechanics and Astrodynamics problems!

This is a new major release, focused on expanding the initial orbit 
determination capabilities and solving some infrastructure challenges. 
Among the new features are:

* New algorithm to solve Lambert's problem
* New documentation, hosted on Read the Docs
* Python 3 support only

See the changelog for a more complete list of changes:

http://poliastro.readthedocs.org/en/v0.5.0/changelog.html#new-in-poliastro-0-5-0

You can install it using either pip or conda:

    $ pip install poliastro

    $ conda install poliastro --channel poliastro

If you want to see an overview of poliastro capabilities, check out the 
gallery of Jupyter notebooks where we list some specific applications 
and interesting problems analyzed with this library:

http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/poliastro/poliastro/blob/v0.5.0/examples/index.ipynb

poliastro is now actively seeking for contributors to expand the 
capabilities of the library, improve its documentation, test it on other 
settings and operative systems and much more. If you are willing to 
help, please join our new mailing list on groups.io:

https://groups.io/g/poliastro-dev

This release comes just in time for the 6th International Conference on 
Astrodynamics Tools and Techniques (ICATT), taking place in Darmstadt, 
Germany from March 14th to 17th where I will deliver a paper and a talk 
to describe poliastro in depth:

https://indico.esa.int/indico/event/111/session/32/contribution/5

poliastro is an open source collection of Python subroutines for solving 
problems in Astrodynamics and Orbital Mechanics. It combines cutting 
edge technologies like Python JIT compiling (using numba) with young, 
well developed astronomy packages (like astropy and jplephem) to provide 
a user friendly API for solving Astrodynamics problems. It is therefore 
an experiment to mix the best Python open source practices with my love 
for Orbital Mechanics.

The project is still a work in progress and the API is subject to 
change. Contributions, bug reports, suggestions and advice are more than 
welcome!

/Per Python ad Astra!

/Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez