Celestia Forums

As anyone can imagine, such low flying objects like the ISS are severely affected by atmospheric drag, so its orbital parameters need a continuous adjustments in the form of Coasting arcs for every few orbits.

This means handwork not only copying the parameters from external sources to Celestia, but to translate them often into the format in use in Celestia. A list of most used formats can be found at:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/elements/

Instead of manually typing in the modified orbital sets I would advocate for a common port to import orbital elements where available from sites that currently offer Two-Line orbital element sets, like Current

http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/

This site is offered by Dr. TS Kelso as a public service. It offers current Two-Line Elements for many satellites. The same applies for other solar minor planets or deep space vehicles for which orbital element updates are available online.

This generic problem is excellently solved in Elwood Downey's well known 'xephem' program (where I have been 'helping out' for more than 10 years;-)). The upgrade of the orbit parameters is done with a click of a button. Perl scripts are, of course, another easy but less automatic solution...

fridger

This generic problem is excellently solved in Elwood Downey's well known 'xephem' program (where I have been 'helping out' for more than 10 years;-)). The upgrade of the orbit parameters is done with a click of a button. Perl scripts are, of course, another easy but less automatic solution...

fridger

It seems that upgrading orbital parameters using perl scripts or ssc/xml sheets is a hot topic (see also Professional Asteroid Data topic on this forum). I welcome this initiative that will bring more accuracy and scientific value to Celestia.