Re: 9-digit catalog numbers, will current satellite tracking software work

From: Chris Kuethe via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 22:57:51 -0700
Since I'm backing most of my tooling with a database it's a simple matter
to have columns for 5 digit norad numbers, 7 character international
designators, up-converted 9 or 10 character designators (assuming >1000
launches per year and maybe a bunch of debris from them all), as well as
individual columns for year, launch, and piece). For non-norad catalogs, I
just put any old thing into the object identifier fields when I'm
generating a TLE from the orbital parameters, but usually have sentinel
values ('99999' and '99999ZZZ'), then put the identifying information I do
have into the 0 (name) line.

As long as the checksum and whitespace is right, python-sgp4 and
python-skyfield don't really make much use of the identifier fields. I'm
not yet sure about stellarium, gpredict, look4sat, ... have the Powers That
Be said what they're going to do yet? Perhaps reusing the ephemeris type
and element set number fields?

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 12:30 PM Kevin Fetter via Seesat-l <
seesat-l_at_satobs.org> wrote:

> I have been reading about the need to use 9-digit catalog numbers. What
> effect will this have on software, as current one''s like guide 8 use tle's
> with 5 catalog numbers, to compute where a satellite is.
>
> Thanks
>
> Kevin
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> http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
>


-- 
GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?
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Received on Sun Jul 19 2020 - 00:59:14 UTC

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