[Data-modeling] Astronomy: Celestial Objects and Natural Satellites

[Gordon Mackenzie]

Metapsyche and I did some work a while back to add more useful  
properties for his exoplanet type and I am considering moving most of  
those properties to Celestial Object and adding planet as a co-type.  
Celestial Object is our workhorse of a generic Astronomical Object  
type that is included by Star, Planet, Natural Satellite, Asteroid,  
Comet types. I'm unsure what specifically to retain within exoplanet,  
pretty much most of the non-celestial object bound properties could be  
placed within the Planet type. Exoplanet could be just a boolean true/ 
false for is this planet an exoplanet for that matter.

So Celestial Object would have added specifically:

Discoverer, Discovery Date, Discovery Method, Discovery status,  
Discovery Institution/organization

And then remove/move the data for the related discovery properties in  
Planet/Asteroid/Comet  types to the equivalents in Celestial Body.  
Planet type might have both jupiter and earth-based radius and mass  
properties.

One question I have is whether Natural Satellites should be  
individually added as a property to Planet and Asteroid types or to  
add as a single property to just Celestial Object. The latter is  
simpler, but the former allows cleaner demarcation of moons of  
planetary bodies and asteroidal moons.

~ Gordon

<<< gordon at metaweb.com >>>