G ring Arc moon found at Saturn

[volcanopele]

Today, the discovery of a 500-meter wide moonlet within an arc of material in Saturn's G Ring was announced by the Cassini Imaging Team:

http://ciclops.org/view/5493/Tiny_Moonl ... G_Ring_Arc

For those who want this moon in Celestia, this code works reasonably well (not perfectly, but given the available orbital elements from the IAUC and from known observations and a future encounter):

Code: Select all

"2008S1" "Sol/Saturn"
{
   Class "moon"
   Texture       "asteroid.jpg"
   Radius      0.25
   
   EllipticalOrbit
   {
      Epoch       2454861.5
      Period      0.80812
      SemiMajorAxis   167500
      Eccentricity   0.0002
      Inclination      0.001   #
      AscendingNode   0   #
      ArgOfPericenter   0   # J2000.0
      MeanAnomaly        106   #
   }
   
   UniformRotation
   {
      Inclination        0.0
      MeridianAngle      296.8
   }
}

[Chuft-Captain]

I've added this to poormoons.ssc as "2008 S 1".

poormoons.zip

I'll PM granthutchison to update the official copy (as poormoons.ssc is his baby ).

[volcanopele]

Here is a better version:

Code: Select all

"2008S1" "Sol/Saturn"
{
   Class "moon"
   Texture       "asteroid.jpg"
   Radius      0.25
   
   EllipticalOrbit
   {
      Epoch       2454861.5
      Period      0.808126
      SemiMajorAxis   167495.6
      Eccentricity   0.0002
      Inclination      0.001   #
      AscendingNode   0   #
      ArgOfPericenter   0   # J2000.0
      MeanAnomaly        106   #
   }
   
   UniformRotation
   {
      Inclination        0.0
      MeridianAngle      296.8
   }
}

[granthutchison]

I've added this to poormoons.ssc as "2008 S 1".

poormoons.zip

I'll PM granthutchison to update the official copy (as poormoons.ssc is his baby ).

I sent Selden my own version based on the contents of IAUC #9023, about forty minutes ago as I type this. So it'll appear in due course.

Grant

[volcanopele]

Cool, you are free to use the epoch and mean anomaly from my first solution above (which use purely the orbital elements from the IAUC, the second is an improvement based on Hedman et al. 2007 on the G ring arc).