Orbit simulator 🛰️

High precision satellite ground path simulation based on skyfield library, using SGP4 model.

Features:

• Generating ground path of existing satellites (from NORAD database) or custom satellites (defined using orbital elements
• Ground path is generated in two reference frames:
  • GCS (geographic coordinate system, lat/lon/elevation)
  • ECI (Earth-centered intertial, X/Y/Z)
• Simulating position of the sun and day/night terminator line
• Calculating MLTAN and RAAN
• Simulation results is stored in pandas DataFrame and can be easily exported to CSV file
• Generating animations

Usage

from skyfield.api import load
from ground_path import ground_path
from datetime import datetime

resource_url = 'http://celestrak.com/satcat/tle.php?CATNR=40299'
fname = 'tle_hodoyoshi_1.txt'
satellites = load.tle(resource_url, filename=fname, reload=False)
satellite = satellites['HODOYOSHI 1']
print(satellite)

# generate ground path
date_from = datetime(2018,8,1,0,0,0,0)
date_to = datetime(2018,8,2,0,0,0,0)
freq = 30 # generate data point every 30 seconds
df = ground_path(satellite, date_from, date_to, freq)
df.head()

datetime	X	Y	Z	lat	lon	elevation	ascending	orbit
2018-08-01 00:00:00+00:00	554.203355	-3178.014692	6054.771852	62.118186	-29.613950	499.094947	True	0
2018-08-01 00:00:30+00:00	459.746660	-2995.194778	6154.700398	63.944699	-30.921147	499.336186	True	0
2018-08-01 00:01:00+00:00	364.781322	-2809.061221	6247.800731	65.759775	-32.392397	499.569012	True	0
2018-08-01 00:01:30+00:00	269.412421	-2619.820087	6333.969878	67.560777	-34.066235	499.791700	True	0
2018-08-01 00:02:00+00:00	173.745475	-2427.680857	6413.112555	69.344170	-35.993558	500.002625	True	0

Other examples

• 1_ground_path_simulation.ipynb
• 2_visualization.ipynb
• 3_animation.ipynb
• 4_custom_satellites.ipynb
• 5_MLTAN_RAAN.ipynb

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_perturbations_models
• http://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_%28solar%29
• https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy