Celestia Forums

The Stardust cometary probe will be passing near the asteroid 5535 Annefrank on November 2nd on its way to an encounter with the comet Wild 2 on January 2nd, 2004.

Orbits of the three objects, along with some discussion and links to some relevant Web pages are now available on my Web site at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/index.html#3.4.3

A 48KB .zip file containing all of their orbits is at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/stardust.zip

the second link isnt working

Mike,

Thanks for pointing it out. I was half asleep and made typos in both URLs. I think they're OK now.

works!

Very cool stuff . . .

Personally, I'm just using the version of Stardust that uses the .xyz file. Nice work on getting the trajectory. I wish there was a way to get Horizons to use an adaptive time step when generating coordinates. Doing it manually is sort of a pain. Of course, I'm just thankful that Horizons exists at all. It's the place to get orbits and trajectories for Solar System objects.

One suggestion: you should use the new Beginning and Ending fields in your .ssc file. That way, Stardust will only appear after launch and before returning to Earth. (An upcoming change will let you optionally use a date string instead of a Julian date for Beginning, Ending, and Epoch . . .)

--Chris

Chris, I agree that it'd be nice to be able to specify when fine-grain sampling is needed. I left out the begin-end times because I suspected that they might cause an error with older versions of Celestia.

I'll make a separate "enhancement request" in that regard...

selden wrote:Chris, I agree that it'd be nice to be able to specify when fine-grain sampling is needed. I left out the begin-end times because I suspected that they might cause an error with older versions of Celestia.

I'll make a separate "enhancement request" in that regard...

In order to avoid version compatibility problems, Celestia ignores any .ssc fields that it doesn't understand. So adding Beginning and Ending times won't cause problems.

--Chris

Oh, OK. That's great!
For some kinds of mistakes, Celestia silenty ignores the whole file, and I was concerned new keywords might fall into that category.