OpenOrb (or OOrb) is an open-source orbit-computation package.
More detailed documentation is available by doing
cd doc
make pdf
which should produce a PDF document 'OpenOrb_Tutorial_vN.N.pdf'.
OOrb contains, e.g., the statistical orbital ranging method (hereafter referred to as Ranging). Ranging is used to solve the orbital inverse problem of computing non-Gaussian orbital-element probability density functions (p.d.f.s) based on input astrometry.
Ranging is optimized for cases where the amount of astrometry is scarce or spans a relatively short time span. Ranging-based methods have successfully been applied to a variety of different topics such as rigorous ephemeris prediction, orbital-element-distribution studies for trans-neptunian objects, the computation of invariant collision probabilities between NEOs and the Earth, detecting linkages between astrometric asteroid observations within an apparition as well as between apparitions, and in the rigorous analysis of the impact of orbital arc-length and/or astrometric uncertainty on the uncertainty of the resulting orbits.
In OOrb, tools for making ephemeris predictions and classification of objects (i.e., NEO-MBO-TNO) are also available.
- svn
- make
- a Fortran 90/95 compiler
- ncftpget
- gnuplot
- latex
- dvips
- ...
In the root directory of your OOrb installation (=OORBROOT) do
make all_clean
./configure COMPILER TYPE
where COMPILER is gfortran, g95, intel, absoft, compaq, ibm, lahey, or sun, and TYPE is either opt for optimized code or deb for code including debugging information. Then do
cd main/
make oorb
Now you have a working executable called oorb in the OORBROOT/main/ directory. To do something useful, you need to provide the software additional data files which will be prepared in the next section.
The DE405 planetary ephemerides provided by the Solar System Dynamics Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory need to be converted to binary format (e.g., de405.dat) only once by doing
cd OORBROOT/data/JPL_ephemeris/
make
make test
The Minor Planet Center is updating the observatory codes on a daily basis, but an update is not necessarily required until you stumble upon observations from an observatory which isn't listed in your version of the file.
cd OORBROOT/data/
./updateOBSCODE
updates a file called OBSCODE.dat.
Updated via the OOrb Subversion repository by
svn update ET-UT.dat
Updated via the OOrb Subversion repository by
svn update TAI-UTC.dat
The full path to the OOrb configuration file is specified by
- the
--conf=CONFIGURATIONFILEcommand-line parameter - the
$OORB_CONFenvironment variable - the current directory assuming the default name (
oorb.conf)
in this order. That is, option #1 overrides #2 which overrides #3. The path to the default configuration file is OORBROOT/main/oorb.conf.
To compute an orbital solution given astrometric observations, do
oorb --task=ranging --obs-in=OBSERVATIONFILE --orb-out=ORBITFILE
where OBSERVATIONFILE (use of suffix, such as .mpc or.des, is mandatory!) contains the input astrometry and ORBITFILE contains the resulting sampled orbital-element probability-density function (PDF) in OOrb format. The orbits will be written to standard out if --orb-out= is omitted.
If astrometry of several different objects is included in OBSERVATIONFILE, then a command like
oorb --task=ranging --obs-in=OBSERVATIONFILE --separately
will process each object separately and write the output to a separate set of files. The separation into different objects is done using the numbers and/or designations. If both are specified for a line of astrometry, then the number overrides the designation.
oorb --task=lsl --obs-in=OBSERVATIONFILE --orb-in=ORBITFILEIN --orb-out=ORBITFILEOUT
oorb --task=propagation --orb-in=ORBITFILEIN --epoch-mjd-tt=MJD --orb-out=ORBITFILEOUT
Topocentric ephemerides without uncertainty information for, e.g., Mauna Kea (observatory code 568) for the orbital-element epoch are generated by issuing the command:
oorb --task=ephemeris --code=568 --G=GVALUE --orb-in=ORBITFILE
where ORBITFILE (use of suffix, either .orb or .des, is mandatory!) contains the orbits in either the OpenOrb format or DES format and GVALUE refers to the slope parameter in the H,G system (default=0.15). The default for --code is 500, which corresponds to the geocenter. It is also possible to compute ephemerides simultaenously for a range of dates:
oorb --task=ephemeris --code=568 --timespan=TIMESPAN --step=STEP --orb-in=ORBITFILE
Here TIMESPAN specifies how many days into the past (TIMESPAN < 0 days) or future (TIMESPAN > 0 days) you wish to compute ephemerides, and STEP specifies the time interval (in days) between ephemerides. The default is to use an integrator for propagations of the orbital elements, but it is also possible to use the analytical two-body approach by making changes to the configuration file.
The ephemerides are written to stdout unless the --separately option is specified (in which case every object in the input file gets its own output file).
The output is divided into the following columns (as marked by a single-line header)
- Designation is the designation for the orbit/object as specified in the input file,
- Code is the official observatory code assigned by IAU/MPC,
- MJD UTC/UT1 is the UTC (or UT1 before year 1972) ephemeris date (Modified Julian Date),
- Delta, RA and Dec are the topocentric equatorial spherical coordinates (AU, deg, deg),
- dDelta/dt, dRA/dt and dDec/dt are the instantaneous topocentric equatorial spherical sky velocities (for coordinate velocities, divide dRA/dt with the cosine of Dec) (AU/day, 2 x deg/day),
- VMag is the apparent brightness (mag),
- Alt is the altitude of the object (pure geometric altitude where Earth is assumed spherical) (deg),
- Phase is the phase angle of the object (deg),
- LunarElon is the lunar elongation (angular distance between the Moon and the object) (deg),
- LunarAlt is the lunar altitude (pure geometric altitude where Earth is assumed spherical) (deg),
- LunarPhase is the lunar phase where 0 is new moon and 1 is full moon,
- SolarElon is the solar elongation (angular distance between the Sun and the object) (deg),
- SolarAlt is the altitude of the Sun (pure geometric altitude where Earth is assumed spherical) (deg),
- r, HLon, and HLat are the heliocentric ecliptic spherical coordinates (AU, deg, deg),
- TLon and TLat are the topocentric ecliptic spherical coordinates (2 x deg),
- TOCLon and TOCLat are the topocentric opposition-centered ecliptic spherical coordinates (2 x deg),
- HOCLon and HOCLat are the heliocentric opposition-centered ecliptic spherical coordinates (2 x deg),
- TOppLon and TOppLat are the topocentric ecliptic spherical coordinates for the opposition direction (2 x deg),
- HEclObj X Y Z dX/dt dY/dt dZ/dt are the heliocentric ecliptic cartesian coordinates for the object (3 x AU, 3 x AU/day), and
- HEclObsy X Y Z are the heliocentric ecliptic cartesian coordinates for the observer (3 x AU).
- Fedora Core 9 + intel versions 11.8
- Linux + intel 10.1
- Mac OS X 10.5.8 + gfortran 4.3.4 and 4.4.0
- Mac OS X 10.5.8 + g95 0.91
- Mac OS X 10.5.7 + gfortran versions 4.2.3 and 4.3.1
- Fedora Core 9 + gfortran 4.3.0
No. At the moment the only option is to first explicitly propagate the orbits to the desired date by using, e.g.,
oorb --task=propagation --epoch-mjd-utc=DATE --orb-in=ORBITFILEIN --orb-out=ORBITFILEOUT
and then compute the ephemeris using, e.g.,
oorb --task=ephemeris --orb-in=ORBBITFILEOUT
Note that there is no algorithmic reason why you couldn't specify an option like --epoch-mjd-utc=DATE to --task=ephemeris. The option just doesn't exist (yet!).
I've been seeing the following warning message quite frequently: "Could not find inverse of inverse covariance matrix." Should I be concerned, or is this normal?
This is normal and has to do with the numerical instability of the matrix inversion. The information matrix, for which the inversion fails, typically has a large condition number, that is, the inversion results are not accurate, and in this particular case a solution cannot even be found. For a sampling method the impact of the failure on the overall results is expected to be negligible because a successful solution can probably be obtained in the immediate vicinity of the failed one.
Yes there is. Go to http://groups.google.com/group/oorb.
The Python wrappers are under heavy development and change fairly frequently. Use the command-line executable if you need a more stable platform.