I remember getting a basic primer on this stuff when I attended a USAF Space Operations course back when I was in the Army Reserve.
Our textbook (and an excellent book for the layperson interested in this sort of thing) was Understanding Space [1]. It's still sitting on my bookshelf at work and I occasionally have a reason to crack it open.
As a software engineer in the aerospace industry, I was once working on a project to create a simulator for a new satellite program. I got stuck with writing a simulation model for the Attitude Determination and Control system (rather than something non-physics-y like the communications system). A lot of my job involved taking matlab scripts from the scientists and translating them into Ada code. An understanding of the basics of orbital mechanics came in very handy, as otherwise I would really not have had any way of knowing if my model was generating nonsensical output. Not to mention the onus was always on me to prove to a scientist that there was a bug in his algorithm.
Our textbook (and an excellent book for the layperson interested in this sort of thing) was Understanding Space [1]. It's still sitting on my bookshelf at work and I occasionally have a reason to crack it open.
As a software engineer in the aerospace industry, I was once working on a project to create a simulator for a new satellite program. I got stuck with writing a simulation model for the Attitude Determination and Control system (rather than something non-physics-y like the communications system). A lot of my job involved taking matlab scripts from the scientists and translating them into Ada code. An understanding of the basics of orbital mechanics came in very handy, as otherwise I would really not have had any way of knowing if my model was generating nonsensical output. Not to mention the onus was always on me to prove to a scientist that there was a bug in his algorithm.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Space-Introduction-Astro...