Very Odd Satellite Behavior

[charles phillipsParticipant]

My use of DataGraph is pretty simple in comparison to some, but it sure speeds up my analyses. I am graphing the critical parameters for several families of spacecraft and see some information that is NOT what I expected.

There are constellations of spacecraft that fly in specific “formations” and those should clearly show up when we plot a critical angle that describes their orbits (the Right Ascension of Ascending Node). Here is an example of a Chinese triplet of satellites:

that have the expected behavior. They have the same angle and they “precess” around the Earth at the expected rate.

Here is a similar plot for some US satellites that have a similar mission:

and they sure have different behavior! I am not sure why, yet but DataGraph helps show how different the two cases are. I suspect that the various satellites “exchange identities” once in a while, so some person mis-tags them.

[dgteamModerator]

Thanks for posting!

You can clearly see for some of the US satellites how they are in a line and then suddenly are much different.  Does look curious and perhaps you are right that the data has been mislabeled.

[charles phillipsParticipant]

This is one case where I fear to assume that straight lines mean anything.

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