Hello,
I have a general question:
I don’t really understand how these Satellite ID and Norad ID are assigned and how they are related. First there is a temporarible ID for a new satellite. Who does give these temporarible ID? And what needs to happen to turn a temporary ID into a permanent ID?
Is there a document or something, where I can read up on the topic?
Greetings
Olaf
Welcome Olaf,
Before Satellites are launched, the final orbit and the id that belongs to it are unknown.
Therefor we use a temporary id, these are selected by @fredy, a SatNOGS core member.
Then once when the orbit is determined by Space-Track and with the help of the SSA proces it will be changed to its definite value.
During orbit determination,we have a period where changes can happen and therefor we also have the Followed NORAD ID. Below an example.
Jan | PE0SAT
Hi @dh1ok,
About Satellite ID and why we are doing steps into using it instead of NORAD ID, you can take a look at this work item Add an unique identifier for satellites (#245) · Issues · librespacefoundation / SatNOGS / satnogs-db · GitLab.
Hello Fredy,
thanks for the hint. This is interesting and much information for me to read. Thanks for sharing.
Olaf
Thank you Jan, this was new for me.
I have another question:
I use the software gpredict or skyroof on Windows to control the antennas here. This works very well, provided the NORAD ID is unique.
However, I ran into the following problem: for some reason, the satellite BY70-4 (Temporary NORAD ID 98247) had its ID changed to A0469—presumably because the official numbers had run out. My problem now is: where can I get TLE data for this satellite that is compatible with my software?
I can retrieve TLEs for the temporary IDs via the SatNOGS API, but they are outdated for this satellite by now.
Naturally, I cannot search spacetrak.org using that designation from satnogs (tempory id), nor can I find the satellite name BY70-4 or BY04—or even the number A0469 or 100469.
I can find TLEs on celestrak.org (https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/gp.php?CATNR=100469),
but I can’t feed this data into my programs.
There has to be a solution for this, but I just can’t figure it out.
You can use as source DB API. A request per day should be enough. There you will find the satellite under its temporary NORAD ID for now. However currently is updated manually, so it is not updated that often, usually once per 3-4 days.
Alternatively you will need to change the A0469 TLE, for example you can replace the A with 0 and you will not need to fix any checksum.
Hopefully by the end of October we are going to offer TLE from DB in 2 different formats, Alpha-5 and and dummy-tle which will replace the character of the Alpha-5 TLE with the number 7. So, in this case from A0469 will become 70469.
I can see the object A0469 in space-track.org in https://www.space-track.org/basicspacedata/query/class/gp/EPOCH/>now-30/orderby/NORAD_CAT_ID,EPOCH/format/3le
Hello Fredy,
You can use as source DB API. A request per day should be enough. There you will find the satellite under its temporary NORAD ID for now. However currently is updated manually, so it is not updated that often, usually once per 3-4 days.
This are intersting news. I didn’t know this.
Hopefully by the end of October we are going to offer TLE from DB in 2 different formats, Alpha-5 and and dummy-tle which will replace the character of the Alpha-5 TLE with the number 7. So, in this case from A0469 will become 70469.
These are nice news also. This helps me very much here at my station to receive the signals from the satellites. And it helps me to understand how this all works together.
I’m gradually realizing the importance of SatNOGS and amateur radio for satellite operations—and just how much the core team achieves here to keep the database clean.
Thank you for the work.
Olaf
