Disclaimer: Although this website contains material that is thematically related to my daily work, all content is being
developped and maintained in my free time, independently from my current employer or the projects I am involved with.
Concept
The last decade has seen a rise in the popularity of comets, on both professional and amateur levels.
Many cometary events, sometimes visible without a telescope, have triggered worldwide campaigns of ground
and space based observations. For instance: the explosion of comet 17P/Holmes, the sungrazers C/2006 P1
(McNaught) and C/2012 S1 (ISON), or the forthcoming close encounter of C/2013 A1 (Siding Springs) and Mars.
Additionally, the Rosetta mission has provided a wealth of data which led to
a huge leap forward in our understanding of comets, but a lot of work remains to be done.
With the overwhelming amount of data available, it becomes more and more important to release
the models we use to analyze these events. This ensures not only that more people get the opportunity to
investigate the data, but is also beneficial for the science itself as everybody is able to see, use, and improve
the models.
As a professional planetary scientist, I have written many tools to process the data I use, especially in
the field of cometary and asteroid science. With the progress of modern computers, it is
now possible to translate these tools to simple HTML/Javascript interfaces and run the models in an Internet
browser. I have decided to make my tools available in this way, to be used by anybody interested in modeling
cometary processes.
For more information on my work and tools, check my
personal webpage.
Models available
- June 2014 - First webtool being released is the Finson-Probstein diagram
- October 2016 - Public release of my software shapeViewer:
a dedicated 3d model visualizer for geomorphologic analysis of small bodies.
Open source
Science must be reproducible. This means that not only data has to be publicly available, but also the tools that led to a given interpretation.
In that spirit, all javascript code presented in this website is distributed under a
BSD license, available in the header of each file.
The code can be consulted directly from the sources of these webpages (Ctrl+U in Firefox and Chrome).
It can also be accessed and improved through a public repository hosted by
Bitbucket.
I intend to distribute the source code of
shapeViewer as well, although open sourcing requires that the code is properly commented and organized, which will take some time.
Terms of use
I kindly ask each publication making use of my tools to include one of the following acknowledgement:
Finson-Probstein diagram:
This research has made use of the scientific software at www.comet-toolbox.com
(Vincent, J.-B., Comet-toolbox: numerical simulations of cometary dust tails in your browser, Asteroids Comets Meteors conference, 2014, Helsinki)
shapeViewer:
This research has made use of the scientific software shapeViewer (www.comet-toolbox.com).
Contact
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Vincent
mail: jean-baptiste.vincent[at]dlr.de
mail: jb.vincent[at]comet-toolbox.com
|
|