Question: Does Observer use any TLE file

[duyang1893]

Hi,

Quote from the 2023-StrarryNet paper: "The constellation observer is designed as a collector for constellation-relevant information, and it maintains three databases related to satellite, ground station and user terminal information respectively."

Are these implemented already in the source code?
I can see in the sn_observer.py that satellite is built using sgp4init and EarthSatellite.from_satrec functions. It seems TLE file are not used. Maybe I have missed something? Thanks!

[xiex386]

Thanks for your interest in our work.
TLE file is not the main focus of this work. There's some websites where you can get the latest TLE data, like CelesTrak, Space Track.
If you want to use these TLEs, you can use the library skyfield to convert them to longitudes, latitudes and heights, like this:

from skyfield.api import load, EarthSatellite, wgs84

ts = load.timescale()
with open('Starlink.tle', 'r') as f:
    for line in f:
        line1 = f.readline()
        line2 = f.readline()
        sat = EarthSatellite(line1, line2, line, ts)
        geocentric = sat.at(ts.utc(2024, 9, 15, 11, 18, 7))
        lat, lon = wgs84.latlon_of(geocentric)
        height = wgs84.height_of(geocentric)
        print(f"{lat.degrees}, {lon.degrees}, {height.km}")