Analyzing Satellite Behavior

[charles phillipsParticipant]

All –

As a “new guy” I am mainly a lurker here but wanted to show people some recent work. I use DataGraph to analyze the behavior of satellites in space and I have been looking at some “low inclination” objects. These are satellites and the upper stages that put them into orbit, along with some pieces that come off of them.

This is a plot of the pieces of the Ariane 5 that put Skynet 5C and Turksat 3A into geosynchronous orbit. Some pieces remain in the “transfer” orbit and those are often confused – as it turns out if we plot a critical angle it is clear which ones do belong with that launch.

From this it is apparent that object 33058 (with the blue dots) does NOT belong with the others. My contention is that the slope of the line allows us to determine if a piece is actually associated with the launch.

Here is 2018-100, another Ariane 5 rocket, there are only two pieces here but you can see that the Sylda (piece of debris) has the same slope.

These apparently are far apart but the angle RAAN is between 0 and 360, so that they are actually very close in RAAN.

I am now writing up an article for The Space Review where I will share these (and other) results and these plots.

Charles

[charles phillipsParticipant]

By the way would it be polite to mention that Announcements is not spelled correctly here? You missed an N between U and C.

Charles

 

[charles phillipsParticipant]

Ok one more thought – how about adding a forum where people can share graphs, etc that they think are neat or note worthy or visually interesting? We all like to talk about what we are doing, our interests, etc and it helps to know what other people do – we might learn from them.

Charles

[pamelaModerator]

Hi Charles,

As always interesting work!

I like the idea of a forum for users to share what they are working on.  I don’t know if this would be part of the general forum or a new category.  Ideas?

P.S. Spelling mistake fixed 🙂

[charles phillipsParticipant]

Pamela –

What would you think about making a forum under “General” that is “Shared Examples” or something? So you would have Announcements and Shared under General?

Charles

 

[charles phillipsParticipant]

Here is another interesting graphic – for some of these missions there are gaps in the data. Hmmm. Here we see that two of the pieces of debris were not tracked for months??

[dgteamModerator]

Charles,

Based on your suggestion, we just added new forum called User Showcase.

Hope this gets some interest!

 

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