Celestia Forums

How can we see this asteroid in Celestia? I guess it was not included. Will it be?

Code shamlessly stolen from ba22a (thanks!)


You know the routine - save it as a .ssc file in your extras directory.
Doesn't get too close to Earth, but quite near...

I posted the parameters here yesterday, see the thread about the 'asteroid colliding with earth'. For fun last night I messed with the parameters a bit and got it to within 3000km... but those arent physical so I won't post them (the current position of the asteroid according to these figures and the position of the fake were too different)

I also found a nice list of the oribital elements of 1,942 near-earth objects, including 2002 nt7, which I converted to .ssc format. No sizes so they're all 1km blobs, and not interesting on their own, but its a bit of a shocker watching earth drifting along nonchalantly then turning on the asteroid labels...

ba22a, Out of interest where is that list

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_elem

See also:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html

for a MUCH bigger list (167,000 objects!), including asteroids. To do a decent job of converting these for celestia, you want sizes and albedos as well. This link:

http://www.bitnik.com/mp/archive/Formula.html

gives three values for spectral slope G and corresponding average albedos; you can interpolate these to estimate albedo from G, the page then has a formula for the diameter of the object in terms of the albedo and H. H and G are given in the tables above.

Thank you

the radius is 1000 meters, not 2.

and here is somw more accurate code:

Assuming this last bit of code is actually accurate, the best "near miss" I've found was January 30, 2035. It comes within 5 million km. That's reasonably distant, yet close enough to use 10x binoculars to see the earth from the asteroid, and possibly make out a continent or two.. I think. :)

-Bones.