Aerospace Dynamics
MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics offers this undergraduate course extending the dynamics material from Unified Engineering. Lessons cover vector kinematics applied to translation and rotation of rigid bodies, then move through Newtonian and Lagrangian methods for formulating and solving equations of motion. Numerical methods for rigid body dynamics problems round out the toolkit. Applications draw on aircraft flight dynamics and spacecraft attitude dynamics, giving the abstract formulations a concrete engineering context. As with other MIT OpenCourseWare offerings, materials include lecture notes, assignments, and exams used in the actual MIT classroom, available at no cost under a Creative Commons license. There is no instructor interaction or certificate, but the full curriculum used to teach MIT aero-astro undergraduates is here to work through independently.