Re: Requesting info on controlled flaring satellites, in particular COSMO-SkyMed and MetOp

A windows program.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/previsat/

So I suggest that you ask the programmer for the information you need, i.e.
angles and other technical info.

A program called iridflare, computed flares from the solar panels of the
original iridium sat's.

On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 12:25 PM Vladyslav Huba via Seesat-l <
seesat-l_at_lists.seesatmail.org> wrote:

> Hey there, it's been a little while.
> I'm creating a web app that is hugely inspired by the desktop app,
> Heavensat.
> This is also why I didn't think a lot about how to name it and named it
> simply Heavensat Web for now :)
> It is open source and in its current state can be found at
> https://1valdis.github.io/heavensat-web/
> Don't take it as any sort of release announcement, however, this is only
> to show a
> work in progress. The app isn't mobile friendly for now, and there are a
> lot
> of features to make and a few issues to fix.
> Eventually I want to make the calculation of satellite flares for the app.
> For starters, I want
> to implement the same technique as in the desktop Heavensat. There, for a
> given
> satellite mirror you'd have 2 angles: the off-nadir angle and the azimuth
> counting from
> the speed vector, and they describe the normal of the mirror. (There is
> also the third angle
> that describes the spread of the reflected light ray but it's less
> relevant here).
> I want to start from the COSMO-SkyMed and MetOp constellations, as their
> flares
> were calculated on CalSky before its closure and currently there is no
> online resource
> that I know of, that is able to calculate them. And for this I'm asking
> SeeSat-L community
> for the 2 angles if they are known (and in case of MetOp, there would be 3
> sets of angles
> since each satellite has 3 flaring surfaces).
> I haven't been actively observing satellites for a few last years, and I
> don't know
> of any satellites that produce known flares from fixed surfaces other than
> the abovementioned ones. Are there?
> In a broader perspective though, I want to incorporate more complex
> surfaces than
> simply fixed ones. I think that it should be possible to calculate flares
> from solar panels
> and similar rotating surfaces of the controlled satellites, knowing how
> the surfaces rotate.
> And for this I wonder if there was or is any known research into this
> topic.
> I remember CalSky also tried to calculate flares from Iridium solar
> panels, but I don't
> know if those were described as fixed or rotating surfaces; from my
> observations those
> flares also weren't happening. But the attempt was still there.
> Has anyone else attempted calculating flares beyond those from fixed
> surfaces?
> What are the specific satellites that could use such approach?
> If there were attempts, what were the techniques considered to describe
> those surfaces?
> What were the results?
> What are the satellites on which this was attempted?
> Thank you for your attention.
> Sincerely,
> Vlad
>
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>

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