Lambert's Problem: Orbital Rendezvous Transfer Solver
Interactive 3D Lambert's-problem solver: pick a departure orbit, a target orbit and a time of flight and watch the universal-variable solver compute the unique transfer trajectory and burn budget that connects them, exactly as station rendezvous planning works.
Real station-keeping and rendezvous planning rarely gets the luxury of a perfectly aligned Hohmann transfer — a chaser vehicle has to reach a target at a specific position after a specific flight time, from wherever it happens to be. That two-point, fixed-time boundary value problem is Lambert's problem, and this simulator solves it live with the universal-variable method (Stumpff functions plus Newton–Raphson root-finding on the universal anomaly z), the same technique used to plan real rendezvous burns and interplanetary transfer windows. Set a departure radius, a target radius, the angle swept between them and the time of flight, and watch the solver compute the one two-body trajectory that satisfies all four constraints — then verifies itself by numerically integrating Newton's law of gravitation along that trajectory and reporting how close the independent propagation lands to the true target.
Solve Lambert's problem live in 3D: pick a departure orbit, a target orbit, the transfer angle and the flight time, and watch a universal-variable Newton–Raphson solver compute the unique two-body trajectory and burn budget that connects them, then verify itself by numerically integrating the result.
3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install