Celestia
Friday, 12 February 2010 01:10 | 
Written by Aleksey Matyushev | 
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Celestia is an interactive space simulator. It can function in real-time to display everything from orbital trajectories, to constellations, satellites, comets, asteroids, and much much more. Supported by an active add-on repository Celestia Motherload containing over 10 GB of various additions by a variety of creators, Celestia is truly one of the best space simulators on the internet today.
One of the unique features of Celestia is it's ability to fly seamlessly through space. With the 'point-and-go' interface coupled with an exponential zoom, the user can quickly navigate from flying through galaxies to tracking the Deep Space 9 spacecraft as it makes it's way towards the outer edges of the solar system.
Relevant Engineering Uses
Celestia is a wonderful preliminary tool for visualization and planning. With Celestia's built in orbital propagation algorithms, the user is able to find the position of objects in the past, present, and future. This is useful for preliminary planning for space missions, and double checking orbital propagation calculations.
Another VERY useful function of Celestia is it's script driven expandability. Users can quickly create custom scripts and visualize them in the beautiful interactive environment. The Celestia home page contains valuable resources for creating these custom scripts. The custom scripting function is a wonderful alternative to the widely used (but unimaginably expensive) Satellite Tool Kit which is widely use for animated demonstrations (among it being the work-horse software package for anything to do with space).
Overall Celestia has almost no competition. And although it's engineering uses might not seem obvious, it becomes a wonderful tool in the right hands.
Website: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X | Download
openAE Resources: Not yet...you can write some though
Last Updated (Wednesday, 17 February 2010 15:50)
