Graphics Display of Orbital Characteristics of the Planets

Graphics display of the J2000 heliocentric orbital characteristics of the solar system planets.

This submission is a MATLAB script named planet_plot that can be used to graphically display orbital information about the planets of our solar system. This heliocentric data is created and displayed in the J2000 equatorial coordinate system.

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/.

The planet_plot script uses routines from the MICE software suite to read and evaluate the JPL binary ephemeris file. Platform-specific MICE mex files, support functions and other binary 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.