Celestia Forums

I just send to Bruckner three files containing data for satellites orbiting the earth and for comets. In the first file are all the orbital elements and the models for the Iridium and Globalstar constellations which means 129 satellites with low orbits. The second one gets the geostationary satellites and the ones with high eccentricity (I made a standard imaginary satellite model for all of these) and it has more than 2000 satellites. The last one contains data for 313 comets.
All the satellites orbital elements come from the celestrak site (http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/) and for the comets, the Bureau des Longitudes (http://www.bdl.fr/ephem/comets/HTML/ASCII/ELTNOM.TXT).
For all these ssc files, I made another one in which those objects are considered as "moon" in Celestia so we can see their orbits by pressing the 'm' key (it is pretty amazing being able to travel around the earth and cross all these orbital lines or to follow a comet into a 15 millions years journey around the sun !)
I will be releasing other satellites files as soon as I have finished their models (actually as soon as I will get back from holiday !).

I will also send to Bruckner some Starwars planets textures like Coruscant, Tatooine or the Death Star around Endor (which is also a pretty amazing look !)

Wow, that saves me a lot of work then!
Did you create a script to automatically generate the ssc files from the NORAD data or type them out manually?

Yes ortolan, I thought you might liked that !
In fact I used a java soft my brother is working on. It still needs some upgrade as I would like to be able to read other types of orbital data (so I could add into Celestia some of the asteroids data I just found) but I think I'm going to release it soon.

I still got some problems however with the Iridium constellations as I would like to see all the satellites keep pointing at the same location on the Earth. Thanks to Matt McIrvin in a previous topic http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=427, I know how to keep them pointing in the same direction but then you have to give the RotationOffset manually to have them look at the Earth. So if anyone has an idea about it, please let me know.

> Did you create a script to automatically generate the ssc files from the NORAD data or type them out manually?

First off, sorry for the incredibly slow response.
Second off, I've created a script that, I think, does what you want:
Take any object in the CelesTrak database and output the SSC data. The data can be piped into a file.

This isn't tested at all, I've tried it with the ISS and it looks ok, but that's it. If you find any bugs please let me know.

Here it is:
https://github.com/erikjber/orbit_translate