OrbNav tools

Collocation often begins with a need to determine when satellites of interest are able to view the same earth location or are able to view a specific geographic region. Collopak includes a suite of orbital navigation (OrbNav) tools that suit this purpose (and can be applied to many other problems related to satellite navigation).

These tools leverage the SGP4 orbital model and NORAD orbital parameters, both available from CelesTrak.

Running these tools from the command line requires a file named TLINSET containing orbital parameters for the satellites and time period of interest. This file must be present in the working directory when the program is run. The NASA Suomi NPP Atmosphere SIPS hosts a web interface that makes it easy to get the required orbital parameters, or allows you to run many of the OrbNav tools in your brower or via a script-friendly API without needing to download orbital parameters at all.

More complete documentation of these tools is coming soon. For now, refer to the web interface to see what tools are available. Usage information for each command can be seen by providing a single help command line argument.

$ # view usage information for 'where'
$ where help

 where   satl-id   yymmdd  hhmmss

$ # download orbital parameters
$ curl http://sips.ssec.wisc.edu/orbnav/api/v1/tlinset.ascii?sats=AQUA|TERRA&start=2016-01-01T00:00:00Z&end=2016-02-01T00:00:00Z' \
    > TLINSET

$ # run the command
$ where AQUA 160101 182800
...