Error in orbits on neo's?

[Incognito]

I was checking out the encounter with 2002 Em7 for mar 8 and found that it was nowhere near the 500,000 km that it passed by us. I went to http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/close.html and checked out some of the future passes by toutatis and they are way off in Celestia

[chris]

Which version of Celestia are you using? I've confirmed that it gets within 400,000 km of Earth late on March 7th--this is closer than the actual encounter, and I suspect that the error is due to using a simple ellipse to model the orbit of 2002 EM7. The Toutatis approaches are also approximately correct.

--Chris

[Incognito]

I am using 1.2.3 on windows. The program reports 1.2.2 as it's version but the file i dl'd was 1.2.3. I'll email you some pics of some encounters listed in the link above

btw thanks for this awesome program. I've had nonstop fun since i intalled it a couple of days ago. I even was doing flybys of mars with Gustav Holsts Mars theme cranked

[chris]

I figured out what's happening . . . the problem is due to the sign error I introduced in some of the orbital calculations in 1.2.3. This has been fixed for 1.2.4 (preview coming soon!)

--Chris