Space-weather-aware pass quality scorer for ground station operators — looking for feedback

SatNOGS
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Hi SatNOGS community,
I’m Nilabh, an MSc Physics graduate from India. I built OrbitGuard — a tool that scores upcoming satellite pass windows from 0–100 by combining orbital geometry with real-time space weather data.
The motivation: SatNOGS schedules observations based on pass geometry, but a high-elevation pass during a geomagnetic storm can still be a poor observation due to ionospheric scintillation and signal degradation. OrbitGuard adds a space-weather layer on top of the geometry.
Scoring uses:
Elevation angle and pass duration
Real-time Kp index from NOAA SWPC
Solar flux F10.7
Ionospheric TEC
Works for any LEO satellite via NORAD ID, including ones tracked by SatNOGS stations.
Live demo: https://orbitguard-1.onrender.com

Screenshot_20260526-190307~2
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API docs: OrbitGuard API - Swagger UI
I’d genuinely value feedback from people who actually operate ground stations — especially whether the scoring weights make sense operationally, and whether something like this would be useful alongside SatNOGS scheduling.

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Hi @nilabh and welcome!

Is this software open-source?

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image

meh

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Hi. Yes — the full source is on GitHub: GitHub - nilabh-astrophysics/orbitguard · GitHub

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try test it, set the location, etc. and then comparing with gpredict. the result is different, time, max elevation, duration etc. im wondering is your TLE up to date?

73!

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73! Thanks for actually testing it — this is exactly the feedback I needed.

The TLE source is Space-Track.org, fetched fresh and cached for 6 hours. However, if Space-Track is unreachable (which can happen on the free hosting tier I’m using), it falls back to hardcoded TLEs from May 2025 — which would definitely explain timing differences. That’s a real bug and I’ll fix the fallback behaviour.

A few other things that could cause differences vs Gpredict: — Minimum elevation cutoff (I default to 10°, Gpredict may use a different value) — Atmospheric refraction modelling (Skyfield includes refraction, not sure how Gpredict handles it)

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