--- In guide-user@y..., Bill J Gray <pluto@p...> wrote:
> ...
> I expect that my first step in dealing with this problem will be
> to write a program that can read in an MPCORB file and do the
> numerical integration to any desired date (said date limited only
> by your patience; it may take a while to integrate 150,000+
> orbits over a few centuries... fortunately, for most uses, you
> would only need integrate over time spans of perhaps a few
> months, to bring MPCORB to a "current-day" epoch.)
>
> -- Bill
It would be nice to let the user specify a selection of asteroids to
integrate, then save date sorted elements into the file structure.
Why integrate thousands of asteroids if only a few are of interest?
Having done the integraion, converting the state vectors into
osculating elements and saving them to disk periodically would add
little extra computational effort. Selection of perturbing bodies
could considerably affect the integration time, too.
Examples might be to reconstruct the discovery cicumstances of Ceres
or to determine if some of the brightest asteroids might account for
missing Flamsteed stars.
Ross