Graphics Display of the Orbital Characteristics of the Moon

MATLAB script which graphically displays the orbital characteristics of the the Moon's motion.

Graphically displays the following information; semimajor axis, eccentricity, orbital inclination, argument of perigee, right ascension of the ascending node, true anomaly, argument of latitude, apogee radius, perigee radius, geocentric distance, geocentric speed, geocentric declination, ecliptic inclination, ecliptic argument of perigee and longitude of ascending node.

This MATLAB script reads JPL DE430 lunar and solar ephemerides in a machine-independent binary format (kernels) which are available from the SPICE web site and by anonymous ftp from ftp://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/eph/planets/bsp. These *.bsp ephemeris files are IEEE-Little Endian style of binary kernel. This is the binary form native to PC/Linux, PC/Windows and MAC/Intel machines. Additional information about JPL ephemerides can be found at http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/.

The moon_plot script uses routines from the MICE software suite to read and evaluate the JPL ephemeris file. Platform-specific MICE mex files, support functions and the binary ephemeris file (de430.bsp) are available at naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit_MATLAB.html. MICE is a MATLAB implementation of the SPICE library created by JPL.