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- The recommended minimum update cadence is every 8 hours or whenever a maneuver happens, whichever is first.
- Operators should include future planned maneuvers whenever available.
- Operators should begin providing this information as soon as they successfully communicate with newly launched satellites.
Detailed in Section 3.2:
- Operators should provide any other relevant metadata that may assist observers in assessing threats to optical and radio observations.
- This may include, e.g., reflectivity, bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF), effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP), transmission bandpasses, nominal flux density at different frequencies, etc.
Detailed in Section 3.3:
- All operators should adopt a standard format for ephemerides (state vectors, i.e., position and velocity data), such as the plain text NASA Modified ITC Ephemeris format that SpaceX presently uses. (ITC is the International Telecommunications Corporation.)
- All operators should adopt the Celestrak-recommended format[1] for general perturbations (Simplified General Perturbations No. 4 (SGP4) time-averaged Keplerian elements that include drag computations, i.e., the orbital solutions presently provided in TLE format).
Detailed in Section 3.4:
- Promptly establish a publicly-accessible Orbital Solution Portal website under the SatHub umbrella.
- Satellite operators should pay for the hosting and upkeep of this portion of SatHub. Celestrak presently serves a function similar to this, but the public’s ability to retrieve satellite orbital solutions should not be confined to one volunteer-run resource.
- The Orbital Solution Portal should retain rather than overwrite past orbital solutions, so that data can be retroactively used for older observations, and also provide an easy lookup interface for retrieving data.
- Operators and astronomers should work together to write an opensource software tool that translates between ephemerides, the Celestrak-recommended format for general perturbations, and old-style TLEs.
In the subsections that follow, we describe these critical implementation steps in more detail.
SATCON2 Observations Working Group Report
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