Celestia Forums

This is a thread where I post my addons for minor planets and other small bodies of the Solar System. New addons will be continuously added in the replies as I release them. My addons are free to use for both public and personal purposes.

Added after 53 minutes 24 seconds:
2022 Nov 11: Double asteroid 90 Antiope

90 Antiope is a binary system consisting of two large asteroids in close orbit around each other. Located in the outer asteroid belt, these twin asteroids are ancient relics of a catastrophic collision that formed the Themis family of icy, carbon-rich asteroids. The system is well-characterized by mutual eclipses and stellar occultations observed since the beginning of the 2000s, which reveal a jagged terrain with potential giant craters on both components.

For further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90_Antiope
(addon last updated to v2 on 2022 Nov 21)

2022 Nov 21: DART Mission + Didymos & Dimorphos

65803 Didymos and its moon Dimorphos are the asteroid targets of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which impacted Dimorphos in 2022 and ultimately shortened the moon's orbital period by 32 minutes. This impact ejected tons of dust, eventually forming a narrow tail that surrounded the Didymos system for several months. Later in 2026, ESA's upcoming Hera mission will revisit the Didymos system and will investigate the results of the DART impact.

This addon adds the DART spacecraft with accurate SPICE trajectories ((from John Van Vliet)) and recreates the Didymos system in extra detail, which includes:

> Didymos system barycenter
> Radar-based shape model of Didymos (Naidu et al. 2020)
> Fictional model of Dimorphos based on DART imagery (John Van Vliet)
> Textures from DART imagery (fyr02)
> Accurate radii and orbits from occultation, radar, and lightcurve observations
> Change in Dimorphos's orbit upon impact
> Dimorphos impact plume upon impact (BrianJ)
> Desynchronized rotation of Dimorphos after impact
> Post-impact dust tail

Special thanks to zel/fyr02, Askiniy, John Van Vliet, and BrianJ for the textures and models used in this addon, and additional thanks to SevenSpheres and DaveBowman2001 for feedback.

(addon last updated to v2 on 2022 Nov 22)

2023 Aug 7: 50000 Quaoar, Weywot, and ring system

50000 Quaoar is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt that measures approximately 1,110 km in diameter, or about half the size of Pluto. It hosts a single moon named Weywot and two narrow rings which both orbit outside of Quaoar's Roche limit. The outer ring is highly asymmetric and clumpy, with a radial width ranging 5-300 km.

(This addon was posted earlier to celestia.mobi on 19 April 2023: https://celestia.mobi/resources/item?item=79003841-E8FA-6989-927D-98D06F85666B)


Added after 44 minutes 56 seconds:
2023 Aug 7: 2060 Chiron and ring system

2060 Chiron, also known as 95P/Chiron, is the second-largest known centaur that orbits in the outer solar system between Saturn and Uranus, with a diameter of approximately 210 km. Chiron sporadically exhibits cometary activity due to the outgassing of volatile CO and CO2 ices trapped beneath its water-ice-rich surface. In 2015, Chiron was discovered to have a possible ring system consisting of two narrow rings at a 325 km radius, with the peculiarity of inconsistent detections in some occultation observations, implying ring arcs or cometary debris rather than complete rings. Later occultation observations in 2022 showed that Chiron's ring structure had changed since 2011, now showing another narrow ring concentrated at a 423 km radius and a broad, tenuous disk of material extending out to a 580 km radius. The origin and changing behavior of Chiron's rings currently remain unknown, though it is likely that Chiron's cometary activity may play a role in it.

I installed the add-on but I don't display either DART or asteroids.
Celestia 1.7.0 clean installation.

OAStubby wrote:I installed the add-on but I don't display either DART or asteroids.
Celestia 1.7.0 clean installation.

Rename your Didymos addon folder to "65803 Didymos".
That way, Celestia reads and loads the Didymos addon first before either DART or Hera. Celestia recognizes files in alpha-numerical order upon loading

The folder is already called 65803 Didymos.
I tried without any other addons in the extras folder but both DART and Didymos-Dimorphos do not show up in the search, even though I see them loaded during startup.

to see DART you have to be between the Beginning and Ending dates otherwise it is not displayed