Envisat in sun-synchronous orbit

[BrianJ]

I wanted to see if I could simulate an Earth satellite in "sun-synchronous" orbit.

My solution was to place the satellite in an equatorial orbit around an "invisible" object at the centre of the Earth with a highly inclined axis and "Precessing Rotation" of 1yr - it seems to work quite well.

My attempt using Envisat, ESA's largest Earth observation satellite, with an orbit inclined at 98.546deg (Earth equatorial frame), orbit alt. ~760km, passing over the Equator at 10.00AM (local time) each orbit (descending node), is available here (268kb .zip):
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/briansutilit ... nvisat.zip
(.3ds & .jpg model, .ssc and readme.txt)


And now, that's given me an idea of how to show Lagrange Point "halo" orbits in a rotating frame

Cheers,
Brian

[selden]

Don't forget about the Frame constructs. They can be used to do object-locked orientations without having to constrain the orbit. See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia/R ... Sun_Locked

[BrianJ]

Ah yes, I'm already using that for sun-tracking solar panel - and now you've pointed it out, I can see it can be used to set the orbit frame directly. Thanks.

I can't see any way to use it for an orbital plane that precesses around the planet's rotation axis(i.e. sun-synchronous) though, but I think you were referring to the L2 halo orbit rotating frame, anyway. It's perfect for that.

Cheers,
Brian