Entry, Descent, and Landing data Options

[PDP8E]

Hey Kwan..
That animation was extremely sweet!
Watching the landing ellipse come into view with a good enough model of Gale was exciting.
I noticed that the the G forces topped out at 12.5+ during the burning reentry phase (lets hope MSL doesn't pass out!)
I'm looking forward to your refinements. (what is the primary tool (or toolset) you are using?)
Great job !

[kwan3217]

(what is the primary tool (or toolset) you are using?)

Primary tool is PovRAY ray tracer. It takes a text file which describes the scene, where the spacecraft, planet, topography, sun, etc is. The scene description language is basically turing complete so that the scenes (at least how I do it) are more programs than anything. This is a mostly open-source program which I have been able to modify to directly read SPICE files. It is extremely high quality, but also extremely slow. It takes about 1 mintue to render each frame, and 24 frames per second of video.

[walfy]

Thanks, Kwan, for that animation. Very cool to see how it will happen in "real time."