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See for Yourself for Free: Asteroid 2012 DA14's Simulation of Passing by Earth

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Hiren
New Update

The image which you see above is indeed the best possible life-like reproduction of asteroid 2012 DA14 done in Celestia based on the data available to it. Celestia is a 3D cross-platform FOSS solution for astronomy enthusiasts that can simulate a majority of the known universe atleast as far as different types of objects are concerned. It is extremely feature-rich. For instance, based on the above image, if you turn around the camera and keep the time simulation fast enough, you will actually get a glimpse of how the asteroid would have passed by Earth. Not to a very accurate measure because Celestia cannot handle (as of yet) extremely close fly-bys such as this one in an accurate manner, but exciting enough to visualize.

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Moving the simulation time past the above image, if you turn on orbit markers and labels, adjust the camera perspective and zoom out a bit, this is what you will get:

 In this image, the blue line represents Earth's orbit (which looks pretty straight because we are looking at a minor section of what the Earth goes through around the year), the red one is 2012 DA14's orbit and interestingly, the cyan-coloured elliptical orbit is that of the moon.

Download Celestia for your platform from http://ld2.in/4ig .Once installed, do not immediately run it. As of now, Celestia doesn't contain the 2012 DA14 asteroid in it's built-in set of objects to simulate. However, thankfully, Ulrich Dickmann has developed an add-on which you can get from http://ld2.in/4ik which contains licensing information about how to use the add-on (it's meant for private use only and any commercial use/public performance is prohibited), installation instructions for the add-on and also how to use it with Celestia, which will lead you to similar images as captured above.

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