Andy Puckett Feb 28, 2013
On Feb 26, 2013, at 5:25 PM, Bill Gray <pluto@...> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Yet another development version update :
>
> http://www.projectpluto.com/pluto/devel/find_orb.htm
>
> Quite a few improvements in this, mostly involving asteroid
> perturbers. As has been discussed a bit on this list, the program
> can now handle the 300 perturbers in BC-405. I think you'll find
> it's not too difficult to use this capability. You _do_ have to be
> a little patient, though. I still think some advanced trickery is
> possible to reduce the computational workload by a big factor (most
> of those 300 perturbers will be forever strangers to our object of
> interest... but which ones?), but the current version is at least
> useable. Also, the program appears to be quite stable now. If
> further testing confirms this, I'd like to make this the "official"
> release before doing more experimenting.
>
> Anyway. The other significant improvements in this version are
> the ability to do asteroid mass determination, and to get
> asteroid-centric ephemerides. All of this is documented at the
> above URL.
>
> Somewhat less significantly, when you click on a radar observation,
> you get info on the observed round-trip time and Doppler shift, and
> the computed round-trip time and Doppler shift. Not a big thing by
> itself; but it allows me to get things ready so that Find_Orb can
> include radar observations in orbit determination. That should lead
> to a tremendous increase in accuracy... at least, for the relatively
> few objects that have radar data.
>
> Also: observations can now be fed to Find_Orb with times given
> in HH:MM:SS.SSS format, or with calendar dates or JDs given to
> 1e-9 day ("nanoday", or 86.4 microsecond) precision. Details,
> again, are at the above URL.
>
> -- Bill
>
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