Hi all, for many of our satellite calculations we seem to be using directly or indirectly orbit elements which originate with Spacetrack. I try to come up with a list of independent sources for orbit elements. There is of course Mike McCants legendary classified.tle on http://users2.ev1.net/~mmccants/tles/index.html for satellites that Spacetrack doesn't want others to know about. ISS and Shuttle elements are on JSC's spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/elements which provides the added benefit of listing planned orbit maneuvers. Information on deep space mission orbits can be found on JPL's ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.html Information on a number of European spacecraft can be obtained on http://nng.esoc.esa.de where state vectors can be generated for those satellites and msss.esoc.esa.de http://sci.esa.int where the orbit information is in the form of state vectors but there are also some TLE's to be found. But on those last two sites each spacecraft seems to be handled in a different way and you have to dig deeper to find the elements. I think JAXA has a site for orbit elements of their satellites but I haven't tried it yet. One of the sites providing orbit elements for GPS satellites is http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/ftp/GPS/almanacs/yuma/ These elements are in the GPS-specific Almanac form and would have to be converted correspondingly for input into general orbit propagation programs. Most operational geostationary satellites maintain a tight deadband. An approximate orbit for those satellites can always be generated by knowing their nominal geographic longitude. Jonathan McDowell maintains a geostationary satellite log on www.planet4589.org/jsr.html where those locations can be found. All these sites can be accessed freely without registration and as far as I can see do not impose any restrictions on the use of these data so one could always quote them in e-mails and reports to groups like SeeSat. I'd appreciate any additions to this list and comments. Of course for the bulk of non-classified elements Spacetrack will remain the prime source. It is so much more convenient. But it never hurts to have back-ups! Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 17 2006 - 17:22:10 EST