You can easily find the times for equatorial crossing for ascending
passes from the element set.
Consider Oscar 7
Satellite: AO-07
Catalog number: 07530
Epoch time: 14211.80120610
Element set: 27
Inclination: 101.4754 deg
RA of node: 192.2023 deg
Eccentricity: 0.0011666
Arg of perigee: 207.8798 deg
Mean anomaly: 270.9717 deg
Mean motion: 12.53605918 rev/day
Decay rate: -2.2e-07 rev/day^2
Epoch rev: 81698
Checksum: 281
The epoch time is the reference time for that element set. It also
happens to be the time for the ascending node (equatorial crossing
North-to-South).
In this case it is "14211.80120610" which comes out to the year 2014,
day 211 and the hour comes out to 19.22 hours.. or approximately 19
hours, 13 minutes, 44 seconds.
Ignoring the decay rate, the next ascending node will be in one orbital
period. You can get this by dividing the number of minutes in a day by
the mean motion: 1440/12.53605918=114.869 minutes after the epoch time.
Getting the descending node is more problematic if the orbit is highly
eccentric. In the case of Oscar 7, the eccentricity is small, and it is
close enough to a circular orbit that it is reasonable to assert that
the descending crossing of the equator is very close to 1/2 orbital
period after the ascending node (unless your TLE's are more than a few
days old).
Glen
AA8C
On 08/01/2014 03:07 AM, Paul Stoetzer wrote:
i8CVS posted the directions to calculate EQX and everything else
needed to use an OSCARLATOR from Keplerian elements back in 2003.
http://www.amsat.org/amsat/archive/amsat-bb/200203/msg00749.html
I haven't done any programming in forever, but maybe I'll try to write
a short program to automate those calculations at some point (unless
someone already has).
73,
Paul, N8HM
On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 10:51 PM, EMike McCardel <mccard...@gmail.com> wrote:
Does anyone know of a tracking application or program or some other software or
existing source that will still produces or publishes equatorial crossing data
for current satellites?
EMike
EMike McCardel, KC8YLD
VP for Educational Relations AMSAT-NA
Sent from my iPhone
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