Request for comments: a (hopefully) low maintenance way for anyone to allow people to donate TLE's
Eric Thayer (eht@cs.cmu.edu)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 15:02:14 -0400
- For a master list of supposedly orbiting satellites (maybe filtering out
the tiny debris objects, classified sats)
- Publish the master set of TLE's in a web page or ftp server or both.
Users could then extract subsets from this master list of TLE's.
- Publish the catalog numbers of the worst N (where N might be 50, 100,
etc) satellites according to estimated prediction error (maybe estimated in
the way quicksat does)
- Allow users to make TLE donations via ftp to a well-known incoming
directory (maybe also to a web page, but I am less familiar w/ this process)
- Periodically update (or as donations are made) the master list of
TLE's and the lists of worst N satellite catalog numbers. The update
process would choose a new TLE if it reduced the estimated prediction error
over the TLE in the master list.
In this way, people can donate as they deem fit and the collection process
is automated so that human collection effort is reduced.