Demise of OIG BBS: possibilities for remediation
Allen Thomson (thomsona@netcom.com)
Wed, 10 Jun 1998 11:37:08 -0700 (PDT)
I've taken a quick look at the statistics of the complete elset
files to see what might be involved in an all-OIG-Website operation.
Here are some of the numbers -- all should be regarded as approximate.
Also, this was done in a hurry so there may be important considerations
I've overlooked; please point them out as they appear.
Number of elsets in a satelem file: 8080, of which probably two or
three dozen are from non-NASA sources. Say 8050 elsets that need to
be obtained from OIG.
Number of elsets in the OIG Web's grouptle.zip file: 1300.
Difference: 6780 or 6780/700 ~= 10 person-weeks under OIG's
100 elset/day limit.
Number of objects in satelem with A or B international designators
(i.e., most primary payloads and upper stages) not in grouptle.zip:
1570 (2.25 person weeks)
Number of objects in satelem with A through K international designators
(picks up, e.g., Soviet/Russian multiple-payload comsats and upper
stages) not in grouptle.zip: 3500 (5 person weeks)
Based on this, it looks as if a two-to-four person collaboration could
keep up with the A and B objects, but doing more than that begins to
look problematic. Prioritization of update frequencies in terms of
the rate at which elesets age (e.g., LEO and Molniya orbits generally
change faster than high, circular ones) would probably help. Any
suggestions for how to measure that?
Of course, we can hope that OIG will simply provide an everything.zip
file on its Web site, in which case all this will be moot. (I should
point out that generating 8080-element satelem elYYMMDD files from raw
OIG files takes about fifteen minutes on my Pentium 233, and my routines
are far from fully automated.)