A MATLAB Script for Predicting Orbital Events of the Planets

Predicts interesting orbital events of the planets of our solar system.

This submission is a MATLAB script named planet_events that can be used to compute interesting orbital events of the planets of our solar system. Using a combination of one-dimensional minimization and root-finding, the planet_events script computes the following geocentric and heliocentric characteristics of planetary orbital motion.

• aphelion and perihelion of a planet
• nodal crossings of a planet
• closest approach distance between two planets
• geocentric minimum angular separation between two planets
• heliocentric minimum angular separation between two planets
• greatest elongation of Mercury or Venus

This MATLAB script reads JPL planetary 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/.

This script also uses routines from the MICE software suite to read and evaluate this ephemeris. The MICE routines and other ephemeris files are available at naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit_MATLAB.html. MICE is a MATLAB implementation of the SPICE library created by JPL.