ISS Orrery
The International Space Station (ISS) is a permanently crewed research laboratory orbiting Earth, built through international collaboration and serving as a platform for scientific experiments. It orbits at an angle of 51.6 degrees with respect to the equator and completes one orbit every 90 minutes. This means the astronauts aboard witness 16 sunrises and sunsets a day.
Traditional orreries (left) are mechanical models typically representing the solar system, and the relative motion and position of the bodies within it. I decided to create an orrery that does not depict the orbit of planetary bodies as expected, but rather the orbit of the International Space Station around the earth.
To accurately represent the motion of the ISS around the earth, different gears were designed to create a gear ratio of 1:16, so that one rotation of the earth occurs exactly every 16 orbits. The direction of the rotation of the earth and of the ISS orbit have to match as well, which the gear train takes into account. Two bevel gears are used to tilt the earth's axis to 52.6 degrees to match the inclination of the actual orbit. The orbital speed can be adjusted with the blue dial on the side. The entire model is 3D printed aside from the DC motor and motor speed controller. It consists of 24 unique printed parts. See below for a time lapse of it running.
The orrery was displayed at the Yale Center of Engineering Innovation and Design (CEID) along side another of my projects about the scales of the universe.
