[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