Create SSC for Comet ISON (C/2012 S1)

[Joe]

Hi

Has anyone tried Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) with Celestia? Where can I find the details about iyt orbital elements?

[kristoffer]

You can see everything here: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2012S1;cad=1

Eccentricity: 1.00000233964133
Semi Major Axis(AU): -5350.118084363769
Perihelion; 0.01251735739059519
Inclination: 61.76712649202648
AscendingNode: 295.7541076262132
MeanAnomaly: 359.9990156708353
Epoch: 2456625.324094641844
Aphelion: ????
Orbital period: ????

[Limax7]

For hyperbolic orbits beter use PericenterDistance then SemiMajorAxis.
Here ssc code to this comet at time close to perihelion date
Anyway I set MeanAnomaly to 2.952250395318073E-07 but 0.00 will be corect to.

Code: Select all

"C/2012 S1 (ISON)" "Sol"
{
 Class "comet"
 Mesh "roughsphere.cms"
 Texture "asteroid.jpg"
 Radius 3

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
   Epoch            2456625.324094641844 # Epoch close to TP time and set MeanAnomaly
   Period            135459.00070965014 # years
   PericenterDistance   1.244362895007541E-02
   Eccentricity      9.999952821752145E-01
   Inclination         6.238889733909424E+01
   AscendingNode      2.956547122849729E+02
   ArgOfPericenter      3.455641676133329E+02
   MeanAnomaly         2.952250395318073E-07
   }
 UniformRotation { Period 24 }
 
 Albedo 0.04
}


I compare results with SPICE data from HORIZONS/SSD/JPL generated with telnet.