Again, I am working on tracking satellites and have gotten some credible photos - they are documented on my Tracking Satellites page. Getting those photos is very difficult since I live in Houston, Texas which is NOT a place known for good “seeing” conditions. Getting any help to figure out how to get these photos is also an enormous challenge. I have started getting observations and sending them to the satellite tracking community so they can be used to update orbital parameters for satellites.
For now I analyze what is going on in space, what satellites are in what orbits and why they are there.
I have written eleven articles for The Space Review, which come out of some of my analyses.
1. Acknowledging Some Overlooked Satellites
This article is about satellites which will reenter the atmosphere, and may survive to impact the surface, but will likely NOT be covered in the normal reentry warnings.
2. Time For Common Sense With The Satellite Catalog
This is a plea to release orbital parameters for many more satellites, the US Department of Defense does not release parameters for all satellites and that can cause problems, especially with some of the long retired satellites.
3. When Is It Time To Turn Off A Satellite?
4. Satellite Breakups And Related Events
This was my first article for The Space Review and is about breakups of satellites, using details from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and the NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES) and mentions the similar Landsat program.
6. Why US Should Notify The Public Of All Satellites Reentries
The sixth one is about satellites that reenter but no one on the ground is warned. It combines two of my projects - reentering satellites and the situation of where the US keeps some satellites' orbital parameters out of the satellite catalog. This is not done out of malice but is almost certainly a legacy of some long ago decisions.
7. One Analytical Technique That I Am Developing: Assigning Names To Nameless Satellites
While doing some of these analyses I needed to find out where those 9x,xxx satellites came from and that is where the seventh article came from. This article talks about various satellite catalogs and about orbital parameters.
8. A Class Of Satellites Who's Orbits Should Be Public
This article is also a project to try to predict re-entry for satellites that are NOT in the official catalog - we track them with "likely" satellite numbers or as "9x,xxx" satellites. This is a work in progress mostly since we have to work with very few points. One of these days I'll have to put together a synthesis of several of these articles since they are outputs from the same project.
9. Finding Satellites That Are NOT In Any Satellite Catalog (Or List)
Number 9 is a story about some work I did with an observatory in Ukraine, they were using their professional equipment and software to try to find satellites which are not in any satellite catalog. We were looking for satellites in geotransfer type orbits - with high eccentricities.
10. Another Technique To Identify "Unknown" Satellites
This is an article where it combines orbital information from the public Satellite Catalog and from the amateur community, it shows that you can mix those two sources and that the amateur community produces valid orbital information. This story does a short study of three French constellations.
11. Assigning A Satellite To A Particular Launch
This article discusses a technique that I have used in several of these articles, a technique that I am hoping to make more commonly used. Most satellites have a "COSPAR" identification, this identifies which sequential launch of a year that it originates from. This is the "RAAN Test" that can help analysts verify that a satellite has the correct COSPAR id or could be used to assign an id to an "unknown" satellite.
This article is written without referring to any satellites who's parameters are provided by the amateur community, so that people with a connection the the US Department of Defense will be able to refer to it without even hinting about confirming or denying the validity of those orbital parameters.
A number of these articles have used the RAAN Test and it seems to be a useful analytical tool.
Satellites With Perilously Low Perigees
For no good reason, the US Government publishes the default world's official list of satellites that are about to re-enter, but they do NOT include the "off the books" satellites. This must have been dumb decision of some officer years ago and they are now too risk averse to change. I am predicting re-entries for satellites that will NOT appear on the USAF list. I am currently working on more updates to that page.
This software allows me to illustrate how satellites that I am interested in are related - how their orbits compare.
What kind of satellites? Some examples:
ISS and satellites that deploy from it. The ISS deploys a lot of small satellites - CubeSats and some that are larger.
Sun synchronous - these have inclinations larger than 90 degrees, and orbits above 700 km or (in general).
Geotransfer and “Molniya” orbit satellites. The Molniya (lightning in Russian) are satellites with apogee near geosynchronous altitude, perigee is Low Earth Orbit altitude, and inclination of about 63 degrees. When their apogee is over the northern hemisphere, they hang over a part of the Earth for a long time. They are sort of like a geosynchronous satellite that can be seen from high latitudes. Geotransfer satellites are objects (generally upper stages) left in orbits that transfer a payload from Low Earth Orbit (injection) altitude to geosynchronous altitude.
Other Tasks
The applications that are available do not do everything that would be interesting and so I have started to write small applications in C and C++ (so far mainly C since it does what I want it to do) such as to import both Two Line Element (TLE) sets and ISON orbits and calculate perigee, apogee, etc. Then I can export various parameters to a wonderful program called Datagraph to plot parameters and compare orbits. I also have an application to sort a file of TLEs by inclination, perigee, etc. If there is some function that you are interested in let me know and we can talk.
The next page in the site: Adding Other Satellites From Other Sources