Kolano wrote:
- While the existing data files may contradict this, I'd personally like to define "minor-moon" as a moon without an official name (i.e. numbered moons). That may provide a more concrete definition than currently proposed.
As I commented elsewhere a little while ago, I'd suggest the most logical definition would be that a 'minor moon' is one small enough that it's effects aren't considered when calculating the orbits of the other moons. The easist way to determine if that's the case would be to look at the constants defined on the spice file for some minor moon of the planet in question (they're listed in the release file for each ephemeris). The moons whose effects are calculated will have a 'GMXXX' entry in the constants list, where XXX is the object number.