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pmulholland42 / spacecraft-map

2D in-browser map of the solar system
https://petermulholland.co/solarsystemmap/
MIT License
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Distance measurement is not correct #31

Open pmulholland42 opened 3 years ago

pmulholland42 commented 3 years ago
  1. Set the time to July 4, 2020, 7:34 a.m. EDT
  2. Select Earth and view the distance from sun stat

Expected result: 152,095,295 km (https://www.space.com/41093-earth-at-aphelion-guide.html) Actual result: higher than that

Possible explanations:

  1. The diameter of the sun and earth need to be subtracted - I tried that and the number was too low
  2. The website is wrong - need to check their source
  3. Inclination needs to be accounted for - Earth's inclination is defined as near 0 though so that shouldn't make that big of a difference. Also I'm not sure if it makes a difference at all when measuring the Earth Sun distance
  4. Something else is wrong - possibly related to #25
pmulholland42 commented 3 years ago

This is probably because the JPL data is for the Earth-Moon barycenter and not Earth itself. I could account for this but I think the better solution will be to use JPL planetary ephemerides for everything instead. I'm considering this outside the scope of the initial release.