Turn a locked moon's pole round with its drawn node, so its axis stays on its orbit at every date the clock reaches

The IAU carries a locked moon's pole round its orbit normal on a term of the node's angle, as a
moon in a Cassini state keeps it, but at the node rate the IAU's source had: Miranda's U11 at
-2024.22 degrees a century where the JPL table its orbit is drawn from has -2030.80, Mimas's S3 at
-36505.5 against -36511.16. Over AD 1-3000 that parted Miranda's drawn axis from its drawn orbit
normal by up to 7.89 degrees (AD 9), so Uranus swung 7.6 degrees north and south on its sky every
1.41 days, and Mimas's by 2.63. Only Iapetus's pole had been put on its orbit.

lockedToOrbit now sets every periodic term whose angle turns within 5 per cent of k times the
drawn node rate (k from 1 to 9, the most the report takes, Triton's) to exactly that multiple, and
moves its constant so the angle, and the pole and W with it, are unchanged on 2025-01-01 (the
2025 pole and W of every changed moon are identical to the 1e-14 degree). Measured: the largest
offset taken is Ganymede's J5, 3.4e-2, then Rhea's 1.2e-2; the nearest term that is not a node is
6.0e-2 out (a W-only term of Miranda's), and Umbriel's W has one 1.0e-2 from ten times its node,
which the k limit leaves. Ten moons change: Deimos, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Mimas, Tethys, Rhea,
Miranda, Triton and Proteus. The Moon and Phobos, whose W carries a quadratic, are left as before,
and so is Callisto's J6, 40 per cent from its node rate.

Worst angle between the spin axis and the drawn orbit normal over AD 1-3000, every 135 days,
before and after: Miranda 7.89 -> 0.42, Mimas 2.63 -> 0.47, Rhea 0.77 -> 0.17, Triton 0.51 ->
0.15, Europa 0.33 -> 0.13, Ganymede 0.50 -> 0.16. Faces: Miranda 2.75 -> 2.39, Mimas 8.94 ->
8.89, Deimos 2.14 -> 2.08, Triton 2.88 -> 2.81; none got worse.

build.ts now checks that angle for every locked moon over the same 8114 dates as the face check,
at most 1 degree (Tethys 0.97, whose IAU pole sits 0.69 from its orbit today; Titan 0.94, whose
IAU pole is still while its node turns in 705 years), with four named ceilings: the Moon 7.1 (its
real 6.7-degree tilt, 6.98 at worst), Phobos 2 and Deimos 2 (1.81 and 1.74) and Proteus 1.2
(1.09), whose IAU poles nod with Mars's and Neptune's precessing poles while the Laplace poles
their orbits are drawn round are fixed. The obliquity check at Horizons' epoch shares the new
axisFromOrbitDeg with it. Nothing checked the axis against the orbit before: an Iapetus pole left
on its Laplace pole, 8.30 degrees off at every date, passed the ETL and the suite.

Guarded mutants, each through the solar ETL and then the suite on the data it wrote:
- node terms left at the IAU rates: the ETL fails with "Moon mimas's spin axis leans up to 2.63
  degrees ... (at most 1 expected)", and the suite with only the new test failing;
- Iapetus's pole put on its Laplace pole, W re-phased so its face today is unchanged (worst face
  16.41, under its 16.5 ceiling): the ETL fails with "Moon iapetus's spin axis leans up to 8.30
  degrees", and the suite with only the new test failing.

Also: lockedToOrbit called the Iapetus normal's circle "8.3 degrees across"; 8.3 is its radius (the
row's i = 8.298 to the Laplace plane) and it is 16.6 across. The README credited every rotation to
pck00011 without saying that a locked moon's W and node terms are re-rated to its JPL mean elements
and Iapetus's pole carried round its orbit normal; both of its lines now say so, as the body
model's doc does.

Unit suite 858/858, etl:typecheck and tsc -p tsconfig.app.json clean, solar ETL passes on the
real data.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-30 17:17:54 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5
parent a15a46c617
commit 74ea1d655e
6 changed files with 144 additions and 67 deletions
+5 -2
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@@ -56,7 +56,10 @@ in it is measured and what is not.
cutting to a new scene. The Sun gets the real solar-system bodies, moving on JPL's mean orbital
elements — Standish's for the planets, JPL SSD's satellite table for the moons, the Small-Body
Database for Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake — and turned by the IAU's rotational elements, Earth
by the IERS Earth Rotation Angle; other
by the IERS Earth Rotation Angle; a tidally locked moon's prime meridian (but the Moon's and
Phobos's) turns at its JPL mean motion and its pole's terms on its node at its JPL node rate, both
re-phased to the IAU's values on 2025-01-01, and Iapetus's pole follows its orbit normal
(`lockedToOrbit`), so each keeps its face to its planet from AD 1 to 3000; other
stars get their confirmed exoplanets. Orbits are drawn as ellipses and bodies are propagated
along them by a Kepler solver to the date on the map's clock. Under them, a dashed grid marks out
round distances in AU — 5 AU rings for the solar system, 0.01 AU rings for TRAPPIST-1 — with a
@@ -330,7 +333,7 @@ plugin's own files are kept so it can be listed from a marketplace of its own la
## Data credits
Star catalogue: [HYG database](https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database) (Hipparcos, Yale
Bright Star, Gliese) — 68 388 stars within 250 pc. Solar-system orbits: JPL approximate planetary mean elements (Standish), JPL SSD satellite mean elements and the JPL Small-Body Database; rotation: the IAU WGCCRE 2015 report via NAIF's pck00011, and for Earth the IERS Conventions 2010; physical data, and the positions the orbits are checked against: NASA/JPL Horizons. Exoplanets: NASA Exoplanet
Bright Star, Gliese) — 68 388 stars within 250 pc. Solar-system orbits: JPL approximate planetary mean elements (Standish), JPL SSD satellite mean elements and the JPL Small-Body Database; rotation: the IAU WGCCRE 2015 report via NAIF's pck00011, with a locked moon's W and node terms re-rated to its JPL mean elements and Iapetus's pole carried round its orbit normal, and for Earth the IERS Conventions 2010; physical data, and the positions the orbits are checked against: NASA/JPL Horizons. Exoplanets: NASA Exoplanet
Archive. Deep-sky objects: [OpenNGC](https://github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC). Body and skybox
imagery: NASA/JPL/USGS public domain and Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0) — per-file provenance
is recorded in `src/assets/textures/README.md`.