zacinaction/KickSat-AsteroidDemo — pull request #1 by drbitboy (2013-10-28 17:22:18+00:00)
Title: Utilities module for KickSat-AsteroidDemo

Hi Zac,

This is Brian Carcich, one of the supporters of KickSat. We communicated briefly a couple of years ago when I worked in Space Sciences Building on Cornell campus. I don't know if your Ida model source is Peter Thomas' original model or not, but I was also his tech support when he developed the Ida and Gaspra shape models from Galileo data, as well as several others from other missions (Mathilde, Eros, Tempel 1, etc.). I am envious of your apparently easy access to 3-D printers; back in the day I think we spent something like 3k$ for the first model of Ida (I think the process was called laser stereolithography).

Anyway, I took some of the common routines in this repo and put them in a new file AsteroidUtilities.py. It basically contains the MagFit routines, AngleSolver, and an OBJ parser; it also contains tests that verify these are functionally identical to your originally versions. The idea was to reduce duplication and simplify maintenance. Some of the serial stuff should probably go in there, too. I used matrices to simplify the MagFit routines, but, CodeGolf points aside, if anything it's uglier now.

I realized this side-project may be just a proof of concept for you and that you are using GitHub to simplify distribution and not to track changes, so I have not integrated the new routine with the existing scripts yet. If you are interested ping me back and I'll finish the cleanup.

Best regards,

Brian Carcich
Latchmoor Services, LLC