Every Satellite Tracked In Realtime Via Google Earth 196
Matt Amato writes "With the recent discussion of the ISS having to dodge some space junk, many people's attention has once again focused on the amount of stuff in orbit around our planet. What many people don't know is that USSTRATCOM tracks and publishes a list of over 13,000 objects that they currently monitor, including active/retired satellites and debris. This data is meaningless to most people, but thanks to Analytical Graphics, it has now been made accessible free of charge to anyone with a copy of Google Earth. By grabbing the KMZ, you can not only view all objects tracked in real-time, but you can also click on them to get more information on the specific satellite, including viewing its orbit trajectory. It's an excellent educational tool for the space-curious. Disclaimer: I not only work for Analytical Graphics, but I'm the one that wrote this tool as a demo."
Confused (Score:5, Interesting)
The title says "every", the summary says 13,000 objects. Is this really complete, or are there objects that are not tracked (or at least not disclosed)?
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Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Confused (Score:5, Funny)
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Nothing is 100% black, so it would still be visible. Besides, it would become too hot.
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Nothing is 100% black
What about black holes? They just need to get the LHD guys to make them some strangelet paint.
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Oops, I meant LHC. Though miners know a lot about black holes too.
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Re:Confused (Score:4, Funny)
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And then when he gets big enough we can use him as a second moon!
Re:Confused (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, no we don't. A black hole weighing as much as a satellite would for all intents and purposes be equivalent to a satellite up there, as far as gravity goes. Except if you hit it you get sucked in, but if you hit a satellite you're in trouble too.
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What if that black hole got pulled into the earth by a collision?
Re:Confused (Score:4, Informative)
Then there would be a black hole with the mass of a sattelite on/inside/passing straight through the Earth. Can you stand beside a satellite without being "sucked in" by gravity? It's the same mass, just in a really small space. Its gravity gets no stronger as a black hole than the gravity as a satellite.
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Okay, but as it sucks in the atmosphere, wouldn't it get more massive? And would it not continue to pull in more and more mass as time went on? Or am I missing something?
Re:Confused (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not a physicist, and am speculating. But I imagine that a black hole of such a small mass would have an event horizon so small that it could fall all the way through the earth without even striking the nucleus of a single atom. It wouldn't "pull in" much of anything -- besides having very little mass itself, at scales that small the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces between atoms are all far more significant than gravity.
Basically, it would only gain mass when through happenstance a subatomic particle happened to cross its event horizon, and while that would mean that eventually the black hole would grow large enough to matter, the infrequency of it gaining any mass and the insignificance of the mass gained each time would mean that it will still be imperceptible to us long after the sun burns out or goes nova.
Re:Confused (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and this is all ignoring the possibility that a black hole that small would simply dissipate via Hawking radiation within a second of coming into being.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
Mass trys NOT to collapse into a black hole... that's why things that aren't big enough (like our sun) won't be black holes. You have to get FREAKISHLY high amounts of mass and insane amounts of gravity to get a baby black hole. It wouldn't orbit earth, we'd orbiit the black hole.
The mass is try to strech back out like a squashed sponge, the gravity tries to squash it. Normally the mass wins because gravity is a very very weak force... it takes a huge mass to create a real black hole... the stuff the LHC is planning are black holes because the mass is compressed enough to count them as black holes, not because they are huge gravity wells. They squash 2 atoms or whatever (probably smaller then atoms) together, and for a billionth of a billionth of a second, it's squashed enough to call a black hole, and then matter expands back out (like 2 rubber balls hitting eachother and then bouncing back). What is interesting is how they bounce off of eachother and what that tells them.
Also, this is why we laugh at people who think man made black holes from the LHC will kill us all... they really have no idea what they are talking about. Once we start taking masses the size of jupitor and the sun and running them thru the LHC, I'd be worried. I'd also be confused as to how we fit them in the LHC...
tl;dr - Gravity is very weak, matter wants to have room to strech out. It takes a lot of matter to make a black hole, more then our sun. There are not tiny black holes that last more then theoretical times because they can't stay squashed.
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They don't usually sell it, they just give it gratis to anyone with a good enough idea for a practical joke involving said paint.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Interesting)
they're usually given away by the glint of sun off their solar panels. you can find information on most of the "secret" satellites with google, they've pretty much all been located by the amateur astronomy community. Some even have pictures of them. Probably really gets some NSA types blood boiling.
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Just strikes me as a very virus vs anti-virus type argument, they keep building them, amateurs keep detecting them - somewhere along the line some genius is going to work it out...
Right? They do have genius' there... oh god...
Re:Confused (Score:4, Interesting)
At the moment it's more of a drm(hiders) vs hackers(finders) situation.
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Since we cannot anyways see the satellite in the morning, I wonder whether we can find an object if it absorbs the EM - since it will look like the background in the night?
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There are things that provide or reflect EM radiation from beyond the orbit of satellites in the sky at night; the most obvious being the moon and stars.
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Naw, the NSA/NRO types don't get boiling blood over it. There simply is no way to hide a launch and orbit so they just have to accept the realities of what it takes to orbit one of these boxes.
Besides, they make cool patches and team logos for the missions and programs, which is more than a public company like Apple allows, so they aren't *that* paranoid about it.
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Got a URL for those cool patches?
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Get John Carmack onto it. He'll make it more black.
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You can't make it any more black. You just can't. You look at this, and I ask you, how much more black can it get? The answer is none. None more black.
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Ahh, there's the giggle I needed this morning.
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Says the guy who has thousands of people reading his comment, and only sees the ones who comment on it.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, they have to be lofted in public view and there is an entire art to determining their missions based on their project patches:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1 [thespacereview.com]
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Re:Confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Every military satellite launched, not just by the US but by *anyone* can be tracked. Even gpredict has keps for US military stuff. You can track it, you can often see it with the naked eye, and you certainly can receive signals from them. Decoding the signals is harder, but with fairly modest equipment you can certainly hear that they are there.
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Every military satellite launched, not just by the US but by *anyone* can be tracked. Even gpredict has keps for US military stuff. You can track it, you can often see it with the naked eye, and you certainly can receive signals from them. Decoding the signals is harder
"Harder" like "cracking RSA on your home PC" hard :-)
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That's the assumption, but just imagine if it wasn't :-)
I wonder how easy it is for them to switch encryption algos on the older birds?
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Assuming that your cryptosystem has been broken, how do you even authenticate to the satellite that you are who you say you are?
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Radar tech: Sir, I'm tracking an object that appears to be roughly eight inches long, orbiting roughly where you'd expect an object to be if it were jettisoned from the ISS.
Ex-ISS senior staffer: I don't want to talk about it.
Radar tech: Sir, but according to these readings, it appears to have a bulbous end and is made of silicone rubber...
Ex-ISS senior staffer: Dammit Dennis I said I don't want to talk about it!
Re:Confused (Score:5, Interesting)
However, given the recent interest in commercialized space travel / exploration, it would be in the USStratCom (US Strategic Command)'s best interest to keep X-Prize's rockets off their damn satellites. So I'm guessing the list is pretty comprehensive.
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In the tech industry (marketing aside) terminology is very important. In this case (I'm guessing) it is possible that since he wrote the utility, ALL might mean ALL that he can get data for. This is technically correct, if slightly out of context, despite the source data only being available for 13000-ish object.
That said, 13,000 is a lot to track yet ALL objects being tracked would be more reassuring. After all, mini black holes at the LHC, rogue military space junk, Syria offering peace with Israel. Surel
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No, but I wouldn't plan any trips to the middle east if I were you.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides the conspiracy side of things, there are number of objects that are just simply too small to track. So when satellites have been shot down, or an astronaut drops a bolt, it's out there, but it might not be tracked. The last number I heard was 110k objects over 1cm [space.com] ... and that number's 8 years old.
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Can you really "drop" a bolt in orbit?
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Of course you can. Remember, orbiting is the state of constantly falling towards an object (in this case Earth), but always missing the ground. So the bolt is dropped, falls, and misses the ground over and over. At least until it hits into something else, shoots out into space (unlikely), and/or lowers orbit enough to burn up in the atmosphere.
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why wouldn't you be able to? astronauts are not infallible.
As for it staying in orbit, well given that when its droped it has the same angular momentum as the astronaut, it will probably stay in orbit for a while.
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There are many objects omitted by the released elements. You may recall a spat in August 2007 wherein the French authorities threatened to release elements for what were assumed to be classified US assets.
Also the StratCom elements are subject to an end-user license that prohibits dissemination of the data or any analysis based thereupon. Many amateur observers therefore refrain from using the elements:
http://www.space-track.org/perl/user_agreement.pl [space-track.org]
Ted Molczan and the guys on the SeeSat list do a
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The title says "every", the summary says 13,000 objects. Is this really complete, or are there objects that are not tracked (or at least not disclosed)?
If it were 100% complete, Google would be revealing to terrorists when spy satellites are over their training camps.
So I give your question a relatively firm "NO".
AGI in Exton, PA (Score:5, Funny)
Err, not just Google Earth. (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Wikipedia article on Keyhole Markup Language, the following apps can read and understand it:
* ArcGIS Explorer .NET and Java
* Feature Manipulation Engine (FME)
* Flickr
* Google Earth
* Google Maps
* Google Mobile
* Live Search Maps
* Microsoft Virtual Earth
* Map My Ancestors
* Mapufacture
* Marble (KDE)
* OpenLayers
* Platial
* RouteBuddy for Mac
* WikiMapia
* World Wind
* Yahoo Pipes
* SuperMap iServer (SuperMap IS)
* OpenLAPI, an LGPL implementation of the Location API for Java ME
So, for those of you who don't have, or don't want to use, or can't use Google Earth, there are plenty of other options available.
But yes, it's pretty cool what you can do hey.
Re:Err, not just Google Earth. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of those products are limited to the surface. Google Earth is one of the only ones that also has a space view and a Z axis. So, this particular KML would be of limited usefulness to most of them. For example even Google maps, I have no idea what it would do with this KML.
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Don't forget STSplus, for those still stuck in the DOS age.
And it has features for those wanting to track the Space Shuttle live.
And can looks like the big board at Mission control, or has a rotating earth - user choice.
xplanet? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like every couple months, Google Earth gains another feature that's been working for months or years in the X Planet program. Day/Night artwork, Satellite ephemeris, etc. I'm still waiting for cloud layer updates and I don't think there's a solar or lunar locator on it yet. The interactive nature of Google Earth is nicer than the command-line static image output of X Planet. The author of X Planet had a private script that would take three 120-degree views of radar-measured cloud data from various weather services and stitch them into a single spherical projection to be used in the graphics. He'd update it every 3 hours or so, and host the stitched version. I'm sure Google could arrange a similar process and host the image data in such a way as not to hammer the original servers nor the X Planet server.
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Since it's not the first result in Google (or the second, or even the first page):
http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Indeed, it seems it only makes a static picture, versus being a data exploration tool like Google Earth.
Re:xplanet? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm looking at Hanna, Ike, that splotch that may become something, and Josephine right now, and can see Gustav's remains in Canada. Pretty cool.
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And also.... (Score:5, Interesting)
And NASA's J-Track [nasa.gov]
There is also a plug-in for WorldWind.net.. but that is only 400 objects.. though it could be easily tweaked to show the 13,000 list as well I am sure.
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Yeah, I have been using J-Track for several years. Not as pretty, but gets the job done.
Since the Reagan era (Score:2)
Since the Reagan era, we don't reveal all of the orbits of everything we launch. It's not, of course, like the Russians don't know the orbits of these other satellites, but they are not in our lists.
And, any observation net can only track objects down to a certain size, probably in the few ounce range for 13,000 objects.
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Which means that USA is publishing a list of which objects to watch.
Anything big, but not on the US list -> its a spy satelite. Better cover everything up when it passes overhead.
Sometimes policies like this are just stupid.
j-track 3d (Score:4, Insightful)
The subject sums it up, but I'm getting a little pissed at technology that is developed at NASA (World Wind) is just getting co-opted by Google (Google Earth) with no respect paid to the initial innovators.
J-Track 3D has been around for years doing this exact same function of plotting satellite trajectories including ground trace and additional information if you click on the satellite.
Just because you do it using Google doesn't mean that it's new, cool, innovative or news worthy.
http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3d.html [nasa.gov]
There is also J-Track which on Windows, with its "active desktop" feature, can be set as your background/wallpaper to always be tracking weather and satellites.
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Just because you do it using Google doesn't mean that it's new, cool, innovative or news worthy.
People were doing it with telescopes and pen and paper long before JTRACK3D, just because JTRACK3D did it via software doesn't mean that it's new, cool, innovative or news worthy.
Oh wait, yes, yes it does. And this new revolution of actively sharing data cross platform with any app that wants it is also new, cool, innovative and newsworthy.
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Re:j-track 3d (Score:5, Informative)
The subject sums it up, but I'm getting a little pissed at technology that is developed at NASA (World Wind) is just getting co-opted by Google (Google Earth) with no respect paid to the initial innovators.
Google Earth originated with Keyhole, Inc. (who was bought by Google), not NASA. Keyhole's Earth Viewer (which is now Google Earth) seems to have been first released in 2001; Worldwind's first release was in 2004.
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I think the original point is.. they were done before: "Google Did It" or someone made a KML to do it. People have a mindset that if "Google didn't do it, it must never had been done before".
Well, I was specifically responding to paragraph 1, which seemed to indicate that Google Earth is somehow stealing Worldwind's glory. The rest of that post is pretty relevant though; this KML certainly isn't novel.
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The subject sums it up, but I'm getting a little pissed at technology that is developed at NASA (World Wind) is just getting co-opted by Google (Google Earth) with no respect paid to the initial innovators.
Um well, Google isn't doing anything here accept providing a platform to display data. The data is collected by USSTRATCOM and compiled into KML by Analytical Graphics. I know it is fashionable not to RTFA, but at least read the damn summary.
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Starry Night, too, and it's a nice, very complete companion for amateur astronomers.
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I am currently taking an astronomy class at college and our text came with a copy of Starry Night Enthusiast software. The installer only works for Windows/Mac, but the software is java/opengl. Maybe one of these days I could try to load it under Linux. Anyway, it is rather neat software. I am just starting to explore it and some of the views it produces are incredible. Here is the website: http://www.starrynight.com/ [starrynight.com]
Spy Satellites (Score:5, Interesting)
I've long wondered if something like this is already available to foreign intelligence operatives... it's long been said that say the Russians know exactly when US spy satellites are due to be overhead, and change their behaviour and camouflage anything they don't want seen in time for when the satellites pass overhead.
It raises some interesting issues with respect to national security, the war on drugs/terror/etc. However, given it's all based on public knowledge and you can't exactly outlaw math, I fail to see what the government could do about it.
Re:Spy Satellites (Score:5, Informative)
I think you'll find that your information is a little out of date and mainly applies to older military satellites.
Anything "critical" wold be done with a better satellite or a cloud of smaller satellites that are impossible to "avoid". For instance, GPS demands that at least four satellites are in view at all times from every part of the globe to get an accurate fix. Satellites which are, on the whole, run, controlled or have interests from the US Government. I'm not saying that the GPS system is for primarily military "spying" purposes, but it shows that even the public satellite orbits are enough to basically see anything, anywhere, given the most basic of manoeuvring capability.
What makes you think that all of the "unheard of" satellites are any different, or in fewer numbers, or not able to move to look at anything interesting within a reasonable timeframe? It would be quite pointless, after all, to launch a modern multi-billion dollar military satellite if all that was required was public information / academic data gathered from worldwide telescopes to render them completely useless.
Even easier would be to, oh, I don't know, do things at night (yes, IR-capable satellites exist but it makes things harder straight away)? Or do things in large warehouses with a roof?
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Some things are just difficult to hide in this manner, not to mention expensive. Yes, there is a history of say, the Soviets building nuclear submarines
Re:Spy Satellites (Score:5, Informative)
GPS satellites orbit at around 20200km., Spy satellites (of the take pictures variety - some other types are in geosynchronous orbit, SBIRS and Rhyolite for example) orbit at around 200km (sometime under 100km, sometimes 600km - there's the obvious detail/area trade off).
GSP just requires line of sight. Spy satellite cameras point in some direction.
Claiming there is any relationship at all between having 4 GPS sats in view at any time and what spy satellites are capable of is ridiculous.
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GPS satellites orbit at around 20200km
Hm... that would make for one heck of a long baseline array...
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It raises some interesting issues with respect to national security, the war on drugs/terror/etc. However, given it's all based on public knowledge and you can't exactly outlaw math, I fail to see what the government could do about it.
pssst. Most drones can loiter between 24-48 hours over a given area, and send realtime data back to wherever it needs to go.
I'm sure there's some cool stuff that can be done with satellites that can't be done with drones, But when it comes to taking pictures of who is where? I
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Interesting thought. I assume though that keeping drones up constantly is probably not cost effective. Satellites, while expensive to build and send into orbit, are cheap once they're u
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I think you should take a look at how successful the global hawk program has been, and just look into the return we've gotten on drones in general.
The KH-12's run about a billion dollars a piece, and the launches cost $400 million a piece, per wikipedia. The Global Hawks cost $123 million a piece (again, per wikipedia). Which has would be more useful in providing up to the minute information about someplace halfway around the world?
(of course, the flip side to that argument is that you're not going to fly h
Spy sattelite can shoot pictures at unusual angles (Score:2)
I would assume that with some basic armchair assumptions about the FOV and zoom capabilities of the satellites' cameras
Well the problem is that more modern satellite have supposedly more complicated Cassegrain assemblies [wikipedia.org] making them able to shoot pictures at weird angles.
So although amateurs satellite watcher could very well help establish a precise map of all "über-secret"(*) military satellites *are* - inferring which part of the world are indeed visible and looked at is going to be slightly more complicated.
But civilian applications (knowing which of the official satellite is looking where) could be more easily done
'Nod' tag (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:'Nod' tag (Score:4, Insightful)
Just someone abusing the system, obviously. Too bad I can't use my mod points on the tags. :)
Maybe we should make it so that the masses can cancel a stupid tag by using the negated tag, e.g. if there are several "nod" tags and several people make "!nod" tags it would be a wash and neither displayed.
I can see my house from here! (Score:2)
Remember the days when you had to pay to get a picture of your house taken? Was that a rip? Or does google have enough money around to be able to offer the entire earth (almost) as a free service?
Misleading? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the story might be a little misleading.
I suspect that not every object's info is made available, rather only the objects that USSTRATCOM deems appropriate for public consumption. Spy Sats, classified objects, and other items that they classify as not appropriate certainly doesn't show up in this KML.
Or do they? ;-)
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Re:Misleading? (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that not every object's info is made available, rather only the objects that USSTRATCOM deems appropriate for public consumption. Spy Sats, classified objects, and other items that they classify as not appropriate certainly doesn't show up in this KML.
Or do they? ;-)
They don't.
Last year the French "negotiated" with the USA to remove "secret" French satellites from the list.
And by "negotiated" I mean "threatened to reveal unpublished USA satellites".
http://www.space.com/news/060707_graves_web.html [space.com]
That isn't to say the satellites aren't trackable, they just aren't published publicly by any governments AFAIK.
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Yeah, but wouldn't you just have to locate the blank spots in the sky and start to track that?
Did someone think about clean up? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not as fantastic as it seems (Score:2, Insightful)
I know, it's a wow kind of thing.
But if you think about it a bit, an orbital path can be described by a very few numbers-- the angles to the equator and to Greenwich, and the minor and major radii. All else can be computed on the fly by about 8 lines of code.
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The usual format is NASA 2-line format [celestrak.com]. People (including me) have been using it to track satellites for years.
The orbital models have been refined over the years. The latest version I've seen is this one [celestrak.com].
...laura
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In fact, you need to six variables (state vectors, classical orbital elements, etc...) to define an orbit. The standard distribution format is the two line element (TLE).
You had to see this coming... (Score:3, Funny)
Domo arigato Mr. Amato.
What we should do... (Score:2, Funny)
We should place in front of the ISS a thin, strong lightweight netting.
It could have a number of mass objects (weights) with thrusters to keep them apart. The net would span a few miles catching large debris. Clearing the path for the ISS.
When full, the netting would be closed. And towed to a lower orbit. And eventually burn up in the atmosphere.
Wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
It was certainly a shocker when Google Earth loaded up the satellite data. I knew there was a lot of crap up there, but damn!
If I could make one suggestion, though, should you continue to develop this: Different icons for different classes of satellite? For instance, a greyed-out icon for inactive satellites, a booster for rocket leftovers, a chunk of rock for space debris, etc... I spent about a minute wondering why there were so many weather satellites over the US until I realized that most of them w
That's a disclosure, not a disclaimer (Score:5, Interesting)
Go ahead and mod me OT, but it's Friday and I'm just pissed off to be the last person in the universe who knows the difference between a disclosure statement and a disclaimer.
"This is a cool new toy/tool/product I'm posting on Slashdot, and by the way, I not only work at the company that produces it, I wrote it" is a disclosure.
A disclaimer typically contains language such as "Not responsible for damages resulting from use, or inability to use, this product. Not even if it burns your house, steals your car, drinks your liquor from your old fruit jar, *and* steps on your blue suede shoes."
Disclosure statements are meant to inform the reader of, for example, a potential conflict of interest, and shield the discloser from potential liability (whether legal or just in terms of face) should the disclosure not be made.
Disclaimers are basically just weasel words intended to deny having any liability for, say, the quality or lack thereof, or some product. Or put another way, disclosure is taking responsibility (to some extent, at least, and not always), whereas disclaimers are solely intended to worm out of responsibility that the you probably have, at least morally if not legally. And maybe legally. Not all disclaimers will stand up in court. I wouldn't be surprised if most won't.
Apostrophe's... (Score:3, Funny)
Who needs shadows... (Score:3, Funny)
Patriot Games showed us that women can be identified in spy satellite photos from their, ahem, curves.
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Have you seen Wall-E? It's not that bad. Yet.