Voyager at Neptune: 20 years later..., Memories and reminiscences... Options

[Ian R]

For the 20th anniversary of the Neptune encounter, I've uploaded the official JPL animation of the flyby to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdBOZWB3iAI

I have very fond memories of watching this clip over and over again as a rather eager 9-year old!

Ian.

[4th rock from th...]

For a simple free simulation such as Orbiter, there's no need for great acuracy. There's already a plugin for generating terrain from real or fractal functions. It's great because you can simulate a landing using realistic spacecraft parameters, velocities, mass, atmospheric pressure (if there's an atmosphere present), etc.

Here's more info and screenshots: http://www.orbiterwiki.org/wiki/Orulex

Please remenber that's it's a acurate simulation based on real world phisics and not an arcade starwars like game, so the visuals are not stunning. Nevertheless it runs very well on an average PC and in realtime.
At this time, only SRTM global Earth terrain , Clementine global Moon terrain and MOLA global Mars terrain are avaliable from servers. But it's possible to generate terrain from any grayscale image (less accurate but easier to do). That was what I was thinking about, a simple grayscale jpg with altimeter values on simple cylindrical projection would be very nice :-) ! Of course, there's already color mapped altimetry here:http://www.isprs.org/congresses/beijing200...s/4_pdf/172.pdf but extracting them from the PDF would destroy any accuracy.

[tedstryk]

I have made some Voyager-Neptune at 20 related posts in my long-defunct blog.

http://planetimages.blogspot.com/