I've just lost a large body of work today, and I don't really know how it happened. It seems that my files were converted to garbage, significantly setting back my progress.

Since this is the beginning of the fifth week, I don't have as much time to pick up where I left off. What I lost was essentially the governing equations behind my model. I am not sure if I can continue working toward my original goal of incorporating magnetic hysteresis. Hopefully, our computer tech at MSU will be able to recover the auto-saved files from before the disastrous erasing.

I had made some great progress before this happened. My original thesis goal was to use a higher order numerical model in my program, to make use of a more accurate gravitational model, and to get a powerful and efficient atmospheric model. I have successfully completed all of these requirements by using a 10th order numerical solver (ODE113), incorporating J3 gravitational spherical harmonics, and using the original atmospheric model in Cubesim that logarithmically interpolates between data points. These data points were originally taken from the SMAD handbook.

This week I had planned to use the NRL atmospheric model in conjunction with the Cubesim atmospheric density model. I had plans to use it as a pre-loader of the data required for logarithmic interpolation. The idea was to choose a specific time to grab data from the NRL model and feed that into the Cubesim model, since atmospheric density changes given the location of the sun with respect to the surface of the Earth. In this way, I could do worst-case and best-case atmospheric modeling, and be sure about the accuracy of the resulting orbits. I want to make sure that data being fed into the Cubesim atmospheric density model is as accurate as possible. This is important, because it wouldn't do to have simulated orbits crashing into the Earth too soon, due to haphazardly assumed data imported into the model.

Of course, all of this is now gone since I had the crash. I do remember what I did, and I do have all of my original sources. However, I spend a lot of time trying to revise the code to make it perform more efficiently, so I may still have to start the majority of what I did from scratch. This will reduce the amount of time left in the summer for the rest of my work on the magnetic modeling, something I'm extremely disappointed in; I was hoping to have some interesting results come out of my work, as well as a very well-developed thesis for next year.

More on this later, hopefully in the next couple of days. I will try to explain a little bit more about the inner workings of the programs I have so far.