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Changes Report

Release History

Version	Date	Description
4.0	2008-10-13	major upgrade with new features (GCRF and ITRF2005 frames, DE 405 and DE 406 ephemerides support, improved and greatly simplified date/time support, vastly improved data configuration with zip files support, new tutorials, improved performances, more tests and all identified bugs fixed, new translation files for italian, spanish and norse.
3.1	2008-07-16	This release is the first public release of Orekit.

Release 4.0 - 2008-10-13

Type	Changes	By
	The ephemeris produced by numerical propagator now checks date validity in propagate method.	pascal
	The EME2000/J2000 frame was slightly mis-oriented (about 20 milli arcseconds). It really was the GCRF frame. This has been fixed and now both the GCRF and the EME2000/J2000 are available.	luc
	Dates in UTC within leap seconds are now displayed correctly (i.e. a 61st second is added to the minute).	luc
	Fixed an overflow error in AbsoluteDate that generated an exception when any attempts was made to print dates far away like AbsoluteDate.JULIAN_EPOCH or AbsoluteDate.MODIFIED_JULIAN_EPOCH. Thanks to quinput.	luc
	Changed test configuration to always use a new JVM for each test. This prevents some false positive to be generated.	luc
	The GeodeticPoint constructor arguments has been reordered to reflect more traditional usage, latitude coming before longitude.	luc
	The low accuracy Sun model based on Newcomb theory and the Moon model based on Brown theory have been withdrawn as they are superseded by the support of JPL DE 405 binary ephemerides files.	luc
	The ThirdBody abstract class has been removed and its specific method getMu has been moved up into CelestialBody interface and renamed getGM.	luc
	Improved external data configuration. The java property is now called orekit.data.path and is a colon or semicolon separated path containing directories or zip archives, themselves containing embedded directories or zip archives and data files. This allows easy roll-out of system-wide configuration data that individual users can override by prepending their own data trees in front of the path. This also allows simple configuration since many data files can be stored in easy to handle zip archives.	luc
	Renamed the iers package into data, as it is not IERS specific anymore. Some classes where also moved out of the package and into the frame and time package and their visibility reduced to package only. This improves decoupling and reduces clutter on users by limiting the number of visible classes.	luc
	The performance of IAU-2000 precession-nutation model computation has been tremendously improved, using a combined caching and interpolation approach. The simplified model (which was quite inaccurate in version 3.1) has therefore been removed as it was not needed anymore.	luc
	The ITRF 2005 frame is now supported instead of the older ITRF 2000 frame. The Earth Orientation Parameters data handling classes have been updated to match this change and read the new file format provided by IERS.	luc
	The J2000 frame has been renamed as EME2000 as this name seems to be more widely accepted and reduces confusion with the J2000.0 epoch. The Frame.getJ2000() method is still available, but has been deprecated and will be removed in the future.	luc
	Changed TimeScale from base abstract class to interface only.	luc
	Renamed some classes for better understanding: ChunkedDate is now DateComponents, ChunkedTime is now TimeComponents, ChunksPair is now DateTimeComponents. The getChunks method from AbsoluteDate as also been renamed into getComponents accordingly.	luc
	Added new tutorials.	pascal
	Added predefined local orbital frames: the (t, n, w) frame aligned with velocity and the (q, s, w) frame aligned with position.	luc
	Added a predefined detector for altitude crossing events.	luc
	Added methods to get zenith, nadir, north, south, east and west direction for any GeodeticPoint.	luc
	Added spanish localization for error messages. Thanks to Silvia Ríos Bergantiños.	luc
	Added norse localization for error messages. Thanks to Espen Bjørntvedt.	luc
	Added italian localization for error messages. Thanks to Francesco Coccoluto.	luc
	Added support for mean motion first and second derivatives fields in TLE. Thanks to Derek Surka.	luc
	Added a way to rebuild the two lines of TLE instances.	luc
	Added constructor from already parsed elements for TLE. Thanks to Derek Surka.	luc
	Added a method to retrieve a body-centered inertial frame to the CelestialBody interface. As a consequence, thirteen new frames are predefined: Sun, Moon, planets and barycenters provided by JPL binary ephemerides.	luc
	Support for the JPL DE 405 and DE 406 binary ephemerides files has been added and a factory class SolarSystemBody uses these files to provide implementations of the CelestialBody interface for Sun, Moon, the eight solar system planets,the Pluto dwarf planet as well as the solar system barycenter and Earth-Moon barycenter points.	luc
	The CelestialBody interface now provides velocity as well as position.	luc
	A getCalls() method has been added to the NumericalPropagator class to count the number of calls to the differential equations computation method. This helps tuning the underlying integrator settings in order to improve performances.	luc
	A lot more classes and interfaces are now serializable, to help users embed instance in their own serializable classes.	luc
	Added predefined leap seconds to allow proper turn-key use of the library even without an already configured environment. All known leap seconds at time of writing (2008) are predefined, from 1972-01-01 to 2009-01-01 (the last one has been announced in Bulletin C 36 on 2008-07-04 and is not yet present in the UTC-TAI.history published file)	luc
	Improved user-friendliness of the time-scales by changing methods parameters types to more easily understandable ones.	luc
	Improved user-friendliness of the AbsoluteDate class by adding several new constructors and methods for common cases. It is in particular now possible to use offsets within a time scale, for example to build a date given as a fractional number of days since a reference date in UTC, explicitly ignoring intermediate leap seconds.	luc
	Improved the class handling date/time components: added a constructor to allow building from an offset with respect to a reference epoch, implemented Comparable interface and added equals and hashCode methods.	luc
	Improved the class handling date components: added a constructor to allow building from any reference epoch, not only J2000.0 (thus simplifying use of modified julian day), added getMJD() method, added several constants JULIAN_EPOCH, MODIFIED_JULIAN_EPOCH, FIFTIES_EPOCH, GPS_EPOCH, J2000_EPOCH and JAVA_EPOCH.	luc
	Added a new time scale: GPSScale.	luc
	Added the changes page to the generated site.	luc

Release 3.1 - 2008-07-16

Type	Changes	By