Modelling the Solar System with OnShape by SpoonUnit

Last crawled date: 2 years, 12 months ago

I really liked the original model, but was frustrated with original resolution. Though tc-fea did increase the resolution, I still thought it would be interesting to model this up. mom0sarah's project inspired me to get the job done, and perhaps provide an initial parametric model to anyone wanting to tackle the project.
I used the referenced NASA doc for planetary dimensions, and took Saturn's ring dimensions from Wikipedia. However, as the rings are a mere kilometer thick at most, they simply won't appear after slicing if we leave it there. As a result, the rings are modeled as 6,000km wide so we can see them in the final model !
The first model demonstrates relative sizes. The toughest part was probably creating a model where the planets sat at roughly equal distance apart. I made an assumption to simplify the mathematics, which is why it's not completely perfect in this regard. The most obvious problem lies in the distance between Mars and Jupiter.
If you print at the size uploaded, you'll be loading a model of the planets' (and sun's, part of the edge of which forms the base) relative sizes at a scale of roughly 1mm to 3600Km, rendering our planet a mere 3.5mm diameter marble.
The second model focuses more on relative distances, but due to the sheer distances involved, retains relative sizes in order to have something interesting to show. Once again in this model, Saturns rings are modelled as 6000km thick. As we're more interested in this model in distances though, I had to devise some way to show that. In this case, the distance between each planet is relative to the actual distances between the two planets involved. However, this means that the distance between two non-adjacent planets is not modelled. I started in the full size model by modelling the distance between Mercury and the Sun as 1mm, giving us a scale of 1mm to 0.39AU, or 1mm to 58.3 million Km. However, at that scale, the model was half a meter wide. I scaled it down to 15 cm, resulting in a final scale of 1mm to 216 million Km when looking at the distance between planets.
Even though we seem to have decided that Pluto is no longer large enough to classify as a planet, I decided to leave it in both models.
Finally, the model itself is yours to mess with. You'll need to make a copy of it to your own OnShape account.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/a999e884b0eb8bdc9ec1c200/w/3b9eb41ded2e553036b01c31/e/a6f1bc13458d4ac643d20df4
You can print both models without support. The first should form a modest test for bridging.
E3D Bigbox print - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNguP7DO1K4&feature=youtu.be