Re: [find_orb] Couple of suggestions

Bill J Gray Apr 10, 2010

Hi Andrew,

> Firstly, elements.txt has a nice output of the most recent fit orbit
> which includes keplerian and rectangular/cartesian coordinates. I'd like
> to see this file get appended to when producing a series of
> monte-carlo orbit (and please keep the heliocentric ecliptic elements
> for the position/velocity coordinates!) so the net result is this
> file will have 50, 100 or whatever clone data sets.

That one was easy enough to do. Find_Orb will now create a file,
'state.txt', that is basically just a log of all the 'elements.txt'
files created for a Monte Carlo run. Some parsing will doubtless be
required to get that into Mercury or Swifter, though (dunno much about
either program).

> Secondly, there should be a way of getting a set of the planets'
> position/velocity coordinates for whatever epoch is used for the
> fitting. The main thing is that it has the exact same reference frame
> as the output asteroid coordinates.

That was a little trickier, but not much so. To get it, you'll need
to add the line

PLANET_STATES=y

to the file 'environ.dat'. State vectors for all planets and the moon
will then be shown in 'elements.txt'.

The above is included in the 'in development' version, at

http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/devel/find_orb.htm

...concerning which, more in my next message.

-- Bill