RendezvousWithVesta 1.0.1081

RendezvousWithVesta is a graphical software tool developed by Pasquale Tricarico at the Planetary Science Institute, in support to the NASA DAWN mission. RendezvousWithVesta will allow you to accurately simulate the dynamics of a spacecraft orbiting the asteroid (4) Vesta.
The motivations for developing this tool are:
- understand how the physical parameters of Vesta affect the stability of low polar orbits;
- understand how the physical parameters of Vesta and the orbital elements of DAWN affect the coverage of Vestas surface;
- provide a fast and reliable tool for the generation of orbits suitable for input in the Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) tool.
The output files generated are:
- a SPICE SPK kernel describing the orbit of DAWN around Vesta,
- a formatted ASCII data file containing information about DAWNs orbit, phase angle, and equatorial coordinates with respect to Vesta; see the header of the file for more details;
Main features:
- validated numerical algorithms, tested on NEAR mission data, and capable of accurately reproducing NEARs orbit around Eros;
- complete control over Vestas physical properties: mass, mass distribution model, shape model, rotation period, and pole ecliptic latitude and longitude;
- control over DAWNs initial orbit around Vesta: epoch, radius, equatorial (Vestas equator) inclination, phase angle;
- export simulations as SPICE kernel files and as ASCII data files;
- 3D graphical visualization of the numerical simulation, including the ground tracking of DAWN over Vestas surface;
- 2D plot of the altitude of the spacecraft and of the Vesta profile at nadir;
- completely open source and part of the ORSA framework;
- support for all major platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows;