Loading the huge mainbeltasteroid.ssc file

[Malenfant]

I thought I'd try to see if I could load the Main Belt Asteroids file from the celestia motherlode, at
http://celestiamotherlode.net/creators/ ... ds.ssc.zip

It's a huge file, the whole belt is 230,000 asteroids and the file itself is about 94 MB!

Anyway, after much hacking down of the file I managed to get it working. The reason I did it was just to get some idea of what a real asteroid belt looks like, and all I could manage without (a) dying of old age or (b) my computer physically exploding was the first 10,000 numbered asteroids. But here's what it looks like from above the plane of the solar system, if anyone's interested:



Remember, there's at least 220,000 more asteroids that aren't shown here...

But it's interesting to note that the inner edge of the belt isn't very well defined at all (I think I can make out a change in the density of brown orbits just beyond Mars' orbit, which is barely visible here). The outer edge of the belt (where it stops being solid brown in the picture) is more clearly defined though, but it's got a large 'fuzzy area' between it and Jupiter's orbit. I think (by measuring pixels) the outer edge of the solid brown area is around 3.96 AU (which corresponds almost exactly to the 3:2 resonance with Jupiter). The inner edge is harder to see, but I think it's around 1.65 AU...

[selden]

A confusion factor is that a visual representation like this can't show the orbital relationships very well Many are in (overlapping) elliptical orbits with parameters that are in or which avoid resonances.

And yes, there are many asteroids in the inner regions, too many of which have Earth-crossing orbits.

[Malenfant]

Yeah, now what would be nice is if it was possible to highlight only certain families of asteroids so you could see them in this mess... no idea how you'd do that, except perhaps by selecting the primary member of the family (if it's in the first 10,000 asteroids...)