For GZ you can use the free and excellent program at http://www.izarc.org/

"CR" means carriage return-line feed formatted text.

As for download versus open, hold the "Alt" key down on the keyboard and
click on the link, it will download. I use Firefox but it also works in
Internet Explorer. Hope this helps.

Denis

On 01/03/2010 6:45 AM, barringtonri wrote:
> Making progress.
>
> Ben, that mirror site is carrying the last data published from the main site. It's not current. The only current data is found at
> http://www.minorplanetcenter.org/iau/MPCORB.html
>
> I also threw some hampster/gerbil food mixed with chocolate into one of the vent holes in the computer cage in hopes of energizing the critters on the internal treadmill but they still didn't make the machine run fast enough to comfortably download that huge uncompressed MPCORB.DAT file in active memory. Back when there was a run or save option saving it to disk wasn't too bad, but that run option is murder. Doc, your gerbils are apparently much faster than mine - and I'm not going to ask what you feed them.
>
> The solution came from Abhimat, the high school senior that I'm mentoring for his senior project in asteroid orbit calculation. He pointed me to StuffIt Expander - a decompression file found at
> http://my.smithmicro.com/win/stuffit/expander.html
>
> Now that I've regained the current MPCORB.DAT access can open the smaller NEA and DAILY files in run mode and subsequently saving them as .DAT files.
>
> This might be an appropriate time to admit my ignorance of much of the MPC's nomenclature. I've searched their website high and low and have failed to find an explaination of names used for the various .DAT files
>
> I assume that NEA = Near Earth Asteroid. And that CR signifies Critical, or at least of high interest. Guessing further, NEAtod is a NEA that should be checked out Today and NEAtom can wait until Tomorrow? But then, what is DAILY? And why the numbers such as NEA+03.DAT or NEA-02CR.DAT
>
> Clear skies,
>
> Pete Peterson I15
>
>
> --- In guide-user@yahoogroups.com, "barringtonri"<pecorp@...> wrote:
>>
>> Ahhh Man! Ever since that jerk hacked the MPC they've been struggling to set up a clean hack-proof mirror site. Some things are back up and running at
>>
>> but options are limited.
>>
>> To refresh/update the main MPCORB.DAT file, there's no longer the option to save vs open. It just opens. And it's impossibly large.
>>
>> There is a compressed version that downloads, but it's in a linux friendly GZIP format. Has anyone running Win XP figured out how to deal with a .GZ format?
>>
>> I've spent hours on GnuWin32, but in the end that turns out to be just a compression program, and doesn't seem to open anything.
>>
>> Pretty much out of business for astrometric work right now.
>>
>> Pete Peterson
>>
>
>
>
>
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