Source: The Watchers - 2/15/13, By Chillymanjaro
The following video shows asteroid 2012 DA14 simulated apparent motion, as visible from the Virtual telescope observing site, in Central Italy. Time is running 50x faster than reality. The field of view is of about 13×10 degress. It covers a time span from 18:30 to 20:30 UTC.
Video made by G. Masi using TheSkyX Pro from Software Bisque
To capture the event, AGI aerospace engineers have used our Systems Tool Kit(STK) software to create an animation showing:
-2012 DA14′s deep space trajectory as it approaches Earth
-The pass by Earth below the GEO Belt and crossing the equatorial plane from South to North
-A closeup of the asteroid during its closest approach
-A highlighted portion of Earth orbit that it is expected to pass through
An interactive scenario is available here: http://downloads.agi.com/u/blogs/2012…
You can view it in 3D, add satellites from the database, fuse it with user trajectories and/or calculate close approaches to orbiting satellites with STK Conjunction Analysis Tools(CAT) available here: http://www.agi.com/stk-conjunction-an….
AGI engineers have also created a demo using Cesium, a WebGL virtual globe and map engine. Click here to run the demo:http://cesium.agi.com/2012DA14/
Credit: AstrowebTV / Virtual Telescope, AGI
