Celestia Forums

Solar system completists may like to know, if you haven't noticed already, that two of the new moons of Saturn discovered by Cassini have been given official names: 2004S1 is now Methone and 2004S2 is now Pallene. The names won't be officially confirmed until 2006.

A few months ago, Jeam Tag posted some .ssc co-ordinates for the three new moons: I have reproduced them here for convenience with the new names.

# Numbered moons of Saturn
"Methone" "Sol/Saturn" # Between Mimas and Enceladus / Cassini-Huygens probe 2004
{
Texture "asteroid.jpg" # Default's Asteroid Texture
# Texture "Asteroid-Dark.jpg"
Mesh "asteroid.cms"
Radius 1.5

EllipticalOrbit
{
Period 1.01
SemiMajorAxis 194000
Eccentricity 0.000
Inclination 0.000 #
AscendingNode 000.0 #
ArgOfPericenter 00.0 # J2000.0
MeanAnomaly 000.0 #
}

Albedo 0.7
}

"Pallene" "Sol/Saturn" # Between Mimas and Enceladus / Cassini-Huygens probe 2004
{
Texture "asteroid.jpg" # Default's Asteroid Texture
# Texture "Asteroid-Dark.jpg"
Mesh "asteroid.cms"
Radius 2

EllipticalOrbit
{
Period 1.14
SemiMajorAxis 211000
Eccentricity 0.000
Inclination 0.000 #
AscendingNode 000.0 #
ArgOfPericenter 00.0 # J2000.0
MeanAnomaly 000.0 #
}

Albedo 0.7
}

"2004S3" "Sol/Saturn" # Cassini-Huygens probe 2004
{
Texture "asteroid.jpg" # Default's Asteroid Texture
# Texture "Asteroid-Dark.jpg"
Mesh "asteroid.cms"
Radius 2.25
InfoURL "http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2004-222"

EllipticalOrbit
{
Period 0.7618
SemiMajorAxis 141000
Eccentricity 0.000
Inclination 0.000 #
AscendingNode 000.0 #
ArgOfPericenter 00.0 # J2000.0
MeanAnomaly 000.0 #
}

Albedo 0.7
}

Greetings Singing Badger!

thanks for the ready-made add-on for these moons. Very snappy!

If anyone else tries to copy and paste this ready made add-on into minormoons.ssc or solarsys.ssc, or whatever, and finds Methone appears, but Pallene and 2004S3 don't, it's because of a missing quote (") before the term Sol/Saturn after "Pallene", as in:



Would you care to edit, Singing Badger? Ta.

Spiff.

P.s., you might notice that there's a bit of fun watching 2004S3 make very close approaches to Pandora, but don't write in about it: the orbit data is not likely to be accurate, and orbit perturbations are modelled here, so it's not necessarily so that such close approaches are really happening. Fun to watch though...

Whoops! Well spotted. Fixed it now.