SurfaceCoverage

contact: Pasquale Tricarico <tricaric@psi.edu>

Description

SurfaceCoverage is a graphical software tool developed by Pasquale Tricarico at the Planetary Science Institute, in support to the NASA Dawn mission. It allows to estimate the coverage of the surface of asteroid (4) Vesta by the Dawn spacecraft in a wide range of configurations. The motivations for developing this tool are:

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 interactive analysis of surface coverage;

The main features of SurfaceCoverage are:

for performance reasons the orbit of the spacecraft is NOT integrated but is kept circular over the simulated period; this means that the estimated surface coverage can be considered accurate only at high orbits, and will produce less than accurate results when the orbit gets closer to Vesta's surface;
complete control over Vesta's physical properties: mass, rotation period, and pole ecliptic latitude and longitude;
use of shape model by Thomas et al. (1997);
control over Dawn's initial orbit around Vesta: epoch, radius, equatorial (Vesta's equator) inclination, phase angle;
2D plots of the surface covered, using the color code:
- black = no coverage;
- yellow = partial coverage;
- green = one full coverage;
- dark green = more than one full coverage;
completely open source and part of the ORSA framework;
support for all major platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows;

No output files are generated.

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 SurfaceCoverage 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:

43c392e1b112c4ed41065ec77e0ddd52  SurfaceCoverage-1.0.461-Apple-x86.zip
d7883c2fec19a9453b5fc55b53e3d0cb  SurfaceCoverage-1.0.461-Linux-x86.tar.gz
43860937d7e52bc1866497b40c00a28e  SurfaceCoverage-1.0.461-Windows-x86.zip

To download each package follow this link.

Source Code

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 SurfaceCoverage-1.0.461-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 SurfaceCoverage.exe