Eros orbit out of date?
Posted: 17.09.2002, 02:22
The orbital elements for Eros as provided with Celestia seem to be out of date. As best I can tell, JPL's ephemeris shows Eros to be in the night sky, while Celestia shows it to be up during the day.
I discovered this while generating an ssc file for the asteroids visited by NEAR (all two of them
). I was surprised at the difference in the orbital parameters that are in solarsys.ssc. Perhaps part of the problem is that there's no epoch explicitly associated with the values in solarsys.ssc.
At any rate, updated values for "433 Eros" are available in http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/near.zip along with those of "255 Matilde". They have a "Class" of "moon" so their orbits will be visible.
One way to compare their differences in the orbits is to insert the following entry into your "favorites.cel", start Celestia, enable the "View Option" of "Orbits", and select the "Locations" item "ErosOrbits".
p.s. I've been gathering some links to sites I've found useful so far in http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/index.html.
I discovered this while generating an ssc file for the asteroids visited by NEAR (all two of them
). I was surprised at the difference in the orbital parameters that are in solarsys.ssc. Perhaps part of the problem is that there's no epoch explicitly associated with the values in solarsys.ssc.
At any rate, updated values for "433 Eros" are available in http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/near.zip along with those of "255 Matilde". They have a "Class" of "moon" so their orbits will be visible.
One way to compare their differences in the orbits is to insert the following entry into your "favorites.cel", start Celestia, enable the "View Option" of "Orbits", and select the "Locations" item "ErosOrbits".
"ErosOrbits" {
isFolder false
parentFolder ""
base [ 0.003278577830326326 3.996911588804516e-005 4.757728511083993e-005 ]
offset [ -4.618527782440651e-014 1.670755547800162e-016 -7.447926823889173e-016 ]
axis [ 0.897772 -0.374285 -0.232196 ]
angle 0.848067
time 2452535.473081606
selection "#0/Eros"
coordsys "ecliptical"
}
p.s. I've been gathering some links to sites I've found useful so far in http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/index.html.