As has been discussed before, the ISS and other low earth orbit satellites have unstable, rapidly changing orbits that are not accurately modelled by Celestia's default orbital parameters. Is anyone working on a way to translate standard orbittal parameters as published by NASA, etc, to update Celestia on a regular basis? I would love to fire up Celestia, jump into the ISS and have it accurately be positioned matching the NASA real time satellite map. NASA publishes the orbit in a few ways, including what looks like a standard two line format. It would be great if there were a program, java applet, etc that could input the latest 2 line orbit and spit out a new Celestia ISS.ssc file. Is this even feasible, or would the orbit be wrong again in less than a few days or even hours?
If feasible, I would be willing to give a stab at writing such a script. To do so, I would need to know how the orbittal parameters work in Celestia. Could someone give us a little insight into that? Armed with that knowlege, it probably would not be too bad to write a script that inputs the 2 line orbit and converts it to a new .ssc file.
By the way, I am loving the program, and it never fails to turn heads at work while running full screen. People have asked where I got the great picture, and are astounded when I explain that this a real time simulation, not a picture!