Re: Possibility of much larger TLE catalog later in the decade

From: Gavin Eadie (gavin@umich.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 17 2011 - 00:43:56 UTC

  • Next message: Brad Young: "BY Obs July 17"

    On Jul 2, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Allen Thomson wrote:
    
    > It isn't clear what effect, if any, this will have on the elements available in 
    > Space Track, but it might be worthwhile giving some thought to the possibility 
    > that tracking programs will have to deal with a much greater number of TLEs than 
    > they do now.
    
    Well, it seems that Catalog Number would overflow with more than 99,999 objects cataloged; International Designator is probably OK since all the new objects are from known launches and there's room for up to about 17,500 objects from any one launch (the ISS's 17,500th flake of worn off paint being "98067ZZZ" !).  
    
    We've already overflowed the Revolution Number for some objects -- 15 revs/day only allows about 18 years of counting to reach 99,999.  I did a short search to see if I could find any discussion of how to change the TLE format to cope with such overflows, but came up empty .. has such conversation started?
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