Celestia Forums

I read that the 1.3.2pre8 has cassini and huygens, so I installed it and tryed.
Huygens is orbiting cassini if I understand correctly the scc, but because of that, if not seeing directly ay huygens, it dissapears, or it just goes behind cassinim and it doesnt look good at all...
And then, after separation huygens just dissapears... and when I type huygens in the search bar I have two huygens in the list, and both correspond to the just dissapeares huygens attached to the cassini....
Is there something wrong or its just me??

The odd visual behaviour of the Huygens model when close to the Cassini model is a problem for all 3ds objects in Celestia - Chris has fixed it for the next release.

The occurrence of two Huygens probes in the browser is pretty much unavoidable, I think. Huygens and Cassini travel very close together for a very long way, and then separate for three weeks. The floating-point accuracy of xyz files just isn't good enough to define them as two separate objects travelling together - they'd be all over the place relative to each other. So Huygens needs to be defined relative to Cassini for the long journey, and then separately thereafter. You can easily go to the second Huygens model during the Titan approach.
The alternative is to have three models - [Cassini+Huygens], Cassini and Huygens, for before and after separation. But then you can't follow Cassini right through the mission - it suddenly turns from one model into another one that shoots off and leaves you in empty space. And there are obvious overheads in effectively downloading the same data twice in the form of the combined and separated models.

I thought it was pretty clear, though: there's a Huygens attached to Cassini in the solar system browser, and a Huygens on its own. Doesn't that signal what each model is about?

Grant