Welcome to Orbit Determinator’s documentation!

About Orbit Determinator

The orbitdeterminator package provides tools to compute the orbit of a satellite from positional measurements. It supports both cartesian and spherical coordinates for the initial positional data, two filters for smoothing and removing errors from the initial data set and finally two methods for preliminary orbit determination. The package is labeled as an open source scientific package and can be helpful for projects concerning space orbit tracking.

Lots of university students build their own cubesat’s and set them into space orbit, lots of researchers start building their own ground station to track active satellite missions. For those particular space enthusiasts we suggest using and trying our package. Any feedback is more than welcome and we wish our work to inspire other’s to join us and add more helpful features.

Our future goals for the package is to add a 3d visual graph of the final computed satellite orbit, add more filters, methods and with the help of a tracking ground station to build a server system that computes orbital elements for many active satellite missions.

Installation

Open up your control panel, pip install git if you do not already have it and then clone the github repository of the program https://github.com/aerospaceresearch/orbitdeterminator. Create a new virtual environment for python version 3.4. Then, all you need to do is go to the directory where the package has been cloned with cd orbitdeterminator and run python setup.py install. That should install the package into your Lib/site-packages and you will be able to import and use it. Other than import you can just use it immediately from the clone directory (preferred).

Contents:

Indices and tables