RendezvousWithVesta is a
graphical software tool developed by Pasquale Tricarico at the
Planetary Science Institute, in
support to the NASA DAWN mission.
It
allows 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 Vesta's surface;
provide a fast and reliable tool for the generation of orbits
suitable for input in the Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) tool;
The main features of
RendezvousWithVesta are:
validated numerical algorithms, tested on NEAR mission data, and
capable of accurately reproducing
NEAR's orbit around Eros;
complete control over Vesta's physical properties: mass, mass
distribution model, shape model, rotation period, and pole ecliptic
latitude and longitude;
control over DAWN's initial orbit around Vesta: epoch,
radius, equatorial (Vesta's 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 Vesta's 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;
The output files generated
are:
a SPICE SPK kernel describing the orbit of DAWN around Vesta,
a formatted ASCII data file containing information about DAWN's
orbit, phase angle, and equatorial coordinates with respect to Vesta;
see the header of the file for more details;
Screenshots & Animations
Mailing List
A mailing list is available to
track issues related to this application: the ORSA-tools
mailing list. Feel free to subscribe to it in order to receive
announcements for new releases, to follow the development, and to help
other users.
Download
We make available
RendezvousWithVesta as source code and as distribution packages for
different platforms. The distribution packages do not require any
system installation: after uncompressing them, you'll be ready to
execute the main program. The MD5 checksum of each distribution package
follows:
The source code is available as
a Subversion repository. For instructions on how to retrieve it, see this page. In order to compile it you'll also
need to install some required libraries. Please refer to the orsa.pri file for a list of references, or
contact Pasquale Tricarico for support.
Linux
After extracting the content of the package with:
tar xvfz RendezvousWithVesta-1.0.1081-Linux-x86.tar.gz
start a terminal, cd into the
new directory, and
then execute the script ./runme.LINUX.sh
Mac OS X
After extracting the content of the package, start the Terminal application, usually
found under Applications/Utilities,
then cd into the new
directory, and execute the script ./runme.MACOSX.sh
Windows
After extracting the content of
the package, cd into the new
directory, and then double-click on the executable file RendezvousWithVesta.exe
