My map of all active and future Solar System Missions as of August 1st 2015. After all the excitement at Pluto it is time to put the potential future targets for New Horizons on the map. As of now these are 2014 MU69 and 2014 PN70, but will be reduced to one certain destination this month. And I'm sure it will get a nicer name before New Horizons gets there.
In other news, the first Orion/SLS test mission EM-1 gets more and more Cubesats piggybacking on it, as of now there are 5, Lunar Flashlight and IceCube will go into Moon orbit, NEA Scout into interplanetary space, plus BioSentinel and SkyFire.
Here's the initial release of my latest project: a configurable, open source interactive celestial map. See details at the page and the readme on the GitHub repository. But before I go on any further, here's an example:
It should zoom and rotate with mouse-wheel/dragging or the equivalent gestures on touch devices. Some mobile browsers seem to be preempted by the OS from receiving touch gestures. Mobile Chrome works fine. Whereas desktop Chrome has a weird glitch where you have to hold the finger/mouse button down until the rotation happens while dragging. On all other browsers I tested a 'flick' will suffice, with a little patience, because it's pretty slow at the moment. It gets a lot faster if you set the limit magnitude for stars lower. Well, there's no way around it: there are a lot of stars in the sky!
How to get it on a web page? Easy: Include all the necessary scripts (sea readme), declare an empty div with id "map" and run the code, like so:
Check out the documentation for all the possible configuration parameters. The above linked blog page has a form with all the options to play around with. The repository also contains a page named viewer.html with the same function.
You may have seen the various sky maps on my blog, like half of the pages linked below the header, or this one. Those are all based on a homegrown non-interactive painfully slow sky map program. I've always wanted to make it interactive (and faster), but that would have been a lot of work I don't really have the time for. Well, until I found that d3.js already has all the functionality I needed. line drawing maps, interactions and so on. With some tweaking, like convert all the position from right ascension/declination to latitude/longitude as GeoJSON requires, and a lot more minor and major details that took a lot more time than expected, it's finally good enough to release, and well, here it is.
After the New Horizons flyby of Pluto it is time for an Solar System Exploration History update to version 1.3.12. I remodeled the info box for the Pluto system. (Scroll down to the Kuiper Belt. It's pretty far down.) Hovering over the images will enlarge it and highlight the respective object in the list and show additional details. Hovering over the list item also enlarges the object-image.
The images will be updated when the New Horizons mission will publish new or better pics. Kerberos and Styx will also get images eventually, I think.
Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI, also thanks to Marc Buie (SwRI) for the background map template.
My map of all active and future Solar System Missions as of July 1st 2015. Philae is back on as you may have heard. New in the list are the Rosetta Comet touchdown at it's End-of-Mission, the MarCO cubesats piggybacking on InSIGHT, plus I went ahead and added Europa Clipper. Since it has a Twitter account now, it must be official, right?
The arrival of DSCOVR at the Sun/Earth Lagrange point L1 gives me the opportunity to update the Space Observatories page again after almost a year. The list of future missions has changed a lot more, with many missions canceled and new ones announced, mainly Chinese ones. For this year there are still quite a few mission launches scheduled for which I had no particular reasons to change the date to a later one. We'll see what goes up soon.
I have added an option to set the center coordinates for my interactive celestial map, so far only for equatorial coordinates. It is still interactive, so you can pan and zoom as well, but having a determined center should come in handy for showing the current sky over a location on earth, or other planets. Which is sure to come as a feature, eventually.
Leaving the fields blank is equivalent to 0h, 0°
Now, with D3.js it would be perfectly possible to update the center location (or any other viewing state, for thet matter) without reloading, I just haven't implementet it yet. That's also still to come.
Check out the documentation in the GitHub repository for all possible settings. The above linked blog page has an interactive form with all the options to play around with. The repository also contains a page named viewer.html with the same function.
My map of all active and future Solar System Missions as of June 1st 2015. Not much has changed this month except Bepi-Colombo's launch date to 01/2017. And PROCYON's destination 2000 DP 107 went with the craft's capability to get there. We still may hear from Philae again this month, or next month, or the one after that.
