Hi Kevin, A late reply here : I've looked a bit at the documentation of how this is all supposed to work. There's some good description and useful links at https://celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/gp-data-formats.php It sounds as if the "100K Crisis" for NORAD numbers is probably not far off; the new Space Fence on Kwajalein Atoll may blow right past that, possibly bringing us up to a quarter million objects. So us software developers will have our work cut out for us. It appears to me that at least for the nonce, the new data will be in a new format that supports nine-digit NORAD numbers and COSPAR IDs beyond 2057. But other than that, the actual orbital data is pretty much the same; we can go on using our existing SGP4/SDP4 code. If that's indeed the case, we've got some work to do, but it shouldn't be an especially big deal. I may, for legacy software, abuse the 3LE format to store "oversized" designations on line 0, leaving lines 1 and 2 to store a traditional TLE with bogus designations. You'd have something that works with ancient software, but still tells you (via the name) the actual designations. Short version : it'll be a minor headache for us programmers, and should be a still smaller nuisance for users. (Unless Space-Track decides to dump SGP4/SDP4 in favor of something snazzier. The new format does allow for alternatives. But that would be really disruptive and seems deeply unlikely to me.) -- Bill _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Sat Jul 18 2020 - 19:50:03 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Sun Jul 19 2020 - 00:50:03 UTC