Piper
Orbiting Space Addict
After learning that a few years ago it was discovered that 216 Kleopatra (the large dog-bone shaped asteroid) had two moons, I decided to make a Kleopatra addon. I'm currently working on the config files and the meshes for the moons (I'm using a publicly available mesh for Kleopatra derived from radar images), and I'm thinking ahead to the texture for Kleopatra itself, and I'm trying to determine roughly what it would look like so I can make a texture with realistic properties. I know that it is believed that the shape of Kleopatra was created from a massive oblique impact roughly 100 million years ago. With such a relatively recent massive impact, it seems likely to me that it would have erased the majority of the largest craters, and the surface would be rough with few craters. I'm also trying to figure out if and what type of terrain difference their would be between the center more cylindrical center, and the two spherical-ish lobes. Would one be more rough and the other dusty and smooth? Or would they be similar?
What are other people thoughts on this? Anybody know of any papers that discuss the possible surface terrain properties of Kleopatra?
---------- Post added Apr 17th, 2014 at 17:05 ---------- Previous post was Apr 16th, 2014 at 20:51 ----------
On a related note, I'm trying to decide on how best to set the radius of Kleopatra and the mesh. Normally, I use the average radius, and size the mesh accordingly, which results in about half of the mesh being inside the defined radius, half out, and means there's a bunch of places on the mesh suitable to put something like a Prelude base for landing. I can technically do this with Kleopatra, but if I do there's won't really be any suitable to place a base. On the other hand (and the way I'm leaning to), I can define the radius to be near the longest arm of Kleopatra, allowing for placement of a Prelude base.
Any thoughts?
What are other people thoughts on this? Anybody know of any papers that discuss the possible surface terrain properties of Kleopatra?
---------- Post added Apr 17th, 2014 at 17:05 ---------- Previous post was Apr 16th, 2014 at 20:51 ----------
On a related note, I'm trying to decide on how best to set the radius of Kleopatra and the mesh. Normally, I use the average radius, and size the mesh accordingly, which results in about half of the mesh being inside the defined radius, half out, and means there's a bunch of places on the mesh suitable to put something like a Prelude base for landing. I can technically do this with Kleopatra, but if I do there's won't really be any suitable to place a base. On the other hand (and the way I'm leaning to), I can define the radius to be near the longest arm of Kleopatra, allowing for placement of a Prelude base.
Any thoughts?
