More OIG

Allen Thomson (thomsona@netcom.com)
Thu, 11 Jun 1998 13:12:24 -0700 (PDT)

(Foreword:  I join everyone else who has expressed thanks to
Phillip and Dave Ransom for posting elset files.)

Phillip Clark said in a couple of posts:

>Basically I believe that super users 
>simply have to justify the continued access to the data on the basis 
>of their full-time work.

This is one of the things I find rather bizarre: why should access
to the entire set of objects need any justification at all?  As
has been more than adequately demonstrated, it imposes no significant
technical burden on OIG. And, unless I switch to full paranoid mode, 
it's not easy to imagine a way to abuse the elsets themselves.

>Goddard does advertise the 
>policy that if an account is abused then it is terminated, which is why 
>the person would have to be trustworthy !

When the Web site came up, I read the warnings about abuse and sent
the sysop a message asking if there were guidelines defining 
approved use and, conversely, abuse of the system.  As yet, there's 
been no answer, and so I really don't know what they'd consider abuse.  
OTOH, the proclamations about needing NASA-blessed(*) superuser access 
to get the complete elset files leave me with the uneasy feeling that, 
by generating and disseminating the satelem files, I may already qualify 
as a naughty person.

>These days I have an archive system which not only processes a TLE file 
>into a central archive, but also extracts el sets for some dedicated 
>archive files which I maintain (NAVSTAR, GLONASS, Oko, Molniya, geosynch 
>and others): using my 233 machine it takes around 15-20 minutes for a 
>single file - and that is with software written in QBASIC: I am sure that 
>other languages could provide more efficient and thus faster code.

QBASIC is the One True Language: virtually all my elset processing, 
analysis and archiving is done in it (well, I do make calls to njsort 
and sometimes export things to a spreadsheet).

(*) Let's remember that NASA is really only a middleman: the
orbital elements originate in SPACECOM.  It's possible some of
the puzzling restrictions originate there and NASA is just
implementing them on behalf of DOD.