destinos
New member
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2009
- Messages
- 81
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 0
If I plug that date into Orbiter, will Mars be in that position? Has anyone checked this out?
You should use OrbitMFD and set REF to Mars, if you want the distance to Mars for example.Yeah, does Target Intercept in IMFD provide a straight-line distance to the target?
No trajectory in space is a straight line, unless you are very far from any gravity source.
Yeah, I mean negating the gravity bowing that would happen near the planets.
Do you want to travel near light speed?
Was my post just skipped over? :lol:I just meant that for purposes of a rough distance measurement between earth and mars, i was prepared to assume uniform dimensions in the solar system's frame. we're talking about dozens of millions of kilometers
Was my post just skipped over? :lol:
Yeah, I mean negating the gravity bowing that would happen near the planets.
ahem...And the space between Earth and Mars is exactly space between planets, and also it is within sun SOI. So you will never get a straight line. Even close to speed of light it will make a very slight curve.
I don't know why you guys are talking about trajectories. The original question regarded the close approach of Mars to Earth in straight-line distance, not a trajectory.
from the Mars wikipedia entry: "On August 27, 2003, at 9:51:13 UT, Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years: 55,758,006 km (0.372719 AU)."
If I plug that date into Orbiter, will Mars be in that position? Has anyone checked this out?
I don't know. I've just tried it now, set the date to 01/09/09 02:00 UTC (31/08/09 22:00 EDT) and it looks just like your real life observation. It matches Stellarium too. The planet was Jupiter, BTW.Does anybody know why that would be?