A long-exposure photo taken by NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick shows star trails, streaks of light over a city, and two Roscosmos crew ships, a Soyuz MS-26 docked to the Lasvet module. (foreground) and Soyuz MS-25 (back) docked to the Lasvet module. The Prichal docking module as the International Space Station orbited 425 miles above central China. Credit: NASA
Space station orbit data has been released! This data, called ephemeris, is generated by the ISS Orbital Operations Planner (TOPO) flight controller located in the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. TOPO tracks where the ISS is, where it’s going, and most importantly, it makes sure it’s not at risk of colliding with other objects in space.
A very thin atmosphere still exists at the altitude of the ISS. This thin atmosphere creates drag that can accumulate errors in TOPO’s predicted ISS orbit over time. For this reason, TOPO updates its predicted trajectory approximately three times a week, allowing the ISS flight control team to make the best orbit estimate possible. Accurate orbits are essential for maintaining communications links, planning rendezvous for visiting vehicles, and ensuring the ISS’s path is free of potential collisions.
The link is to the latest posted ephemeris. Ephemeris complies with the CCSDS Orbital Ephemeris Message (OEM) standard and is available in .txt and .xml file formats. Each file contains a header line containing the ISS mass (kg), drag area (m2), and drag coefficients used to generate the ephemeris.
The header also contains rows containing details of the first and last ascending nodes in the ephemeris span. This is followed by a list of upcoming ISS parallel movement operations called “reboosts” and visiting vehicle launches, arrivals, and departures.
After the header, the ISS state vector in the Mean of J2000 (J2K) reference frame is listed at 4-minute intervals over a total length of 15 days. During a reboost (conversion operation), the state vector is reported every 2 seconds. Each state vector lists the time in UTC. Location X, Y, Z (km). Speed ​​X, Y, Z (km/s).
Ephemeris Message (OEM)
Users of this data should monitor this page for information about future changes to the file format. Past data submissions are archived by searching for “ISS COORDS” at data.nasa.gov.
Citation: Space Station Trajectory Data Now Available (December 6, 2024), December 8, 2024 https://phys.org/news/2024-12-space-station-trajectory. Retrieved from html
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