[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

I am building some web pages about MRO (we're hosting the team website for Mars Climate Sounder) and am looking for a tool that I can use to draw some pictures of the shapes of orbits and ground tracks. I know that there are fancy tools out there, like SOAP, but I am hoping that there are some tools out there that are a little easier to use that I can use to generate some simple diagrams. For instance, I'd like to create one diagram on a flat map projection (simple, mercator, whatever) that shows the 17-day ground track repeat for MRO, and one with Mars as a sphere showing the position of the near-polar orbit, maybe one comparing the orbits of MRO, MGS, and Odyssey, even maybe generate a bunch of diagrams to make an animation showing how as MRO goes around Mars its orbit is sun-synchronous. I know I could do all of this with SOAP but I was never able to use SOAP without a lot of hand-holding from a very patient person at JPL. I would appreciate any advice or help on simpler tools to visualize orbits at Mars!

--Emily

[mcaplinger]

I am building some web pages about MRO (we're hosting the team website for Mars Climate Sounder) and am looking for a tool that I can use to draw some pictures of the shapes of orbits and ground tracks. ... I'd like to create one diagram on a flat map projection (simple, mercator, whatever) that shows the 17-day ground track repeat for MRO, and one with Mars as a sphere showing the position of the near-polar orbit, maybe one comparing the orbits of MRO, MGS, and Odyssey, even maybe generate a bunch of diagrams to make an animation showing how as MRO goes around Mars its orbit is sun-synchronous...

It's somewhat surprising, but I don't know of a tool short of SOAP or STK, both of which have pretty steep learning curves, that do both of the things you want. Most targeting tools only draw groundtracks on maps, not on pretty 3D spheres. For public talks I've used Starry Night and faked the orbital elements. I've heard good things about Celestia, but I don't think it can use SPICE files directly, which you would really want for the groundtrack walk and the sun-sync orbit (both of which would require J2 perturbations to model correctly.)

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

It's somewhat surprising, but I don't know of a tool short of SOAP or STK, both of which have pretty steep learning curves, that do both of the things you want.

I haven't looked at STK in quite a while. I wasn't aware that STK/Advanced VO could run on Windows-based platforms.

[mcaplinger]

I wasn't aware that STK/Advanced VO could run on Windows-based platforms.

I didn't know it ever ran on anything but Windows.

STK probably isn't a great choice. I forget if the free version supports central bodies other than Earth. The SPICE file support, at least when I looked at this a few years ago, was fairly rudimentary and came in an expensive add-on package, like most other STK features.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

I didn't know it ever ran on anything but Windows.

Long ago, I was under the impression that it ran only on UNIX-based platforms, though I'm probably confusing it with another app run exclusively on Sun Micro workstations. At any rate, when I checked out the AGI website, I saw that STK could run on both Windows and UNIX.

[mcaplinger]

when I checked out the AGI website, I saw that STK could run on both Windows and UNIX.

Absolutely right, I stand corrected. At any rate, STK isn't likely to do what you want. It's too bad that no one has written a simple, general tool to do this stuff. Unfortunately, PDS doesn't seem to have released the source for their planet viewer tools -- http://pds-rings.seti.org/tools/index.html -- because that would be close to what one might want.