Satellite orbital elements archive

This is a quick-and-dirty SQL database I built for storing the historical orbital elements of satellites, including a script for trawling data from Celestrak and Space Track to populate the database. These scripts are used for managing the archive of satellite data displayed on the website https://in-the-sky.org.

Setup

1. Database creation

# Create MySQL database and users we will use
cat fetch_data/dbinfo/db_setup.sql | sudo mysql -u root

2. Create database schema

cd fetch_data
./initialize.py

3. Supply credentials to use when fetching data from Space Track

The Space Track website requires all users to agree to their terms and conditions, and individually obtain a username and password to access data. You need to edit the file fetch_data.py (line 261) to insert these credentials into the curl request.

Alternatively, if you only wish to fetch orbital elements from CelesTrak, you can simply comment out the curl request to Space Track (lines 254-276 of fetch_data.py).

4. Fetch orbital elements

cd fetch_data
./fetch_data.py

Now, simply run fetch_data.py as often as you want to fetch the latest orbital elements into your data archive (perhaps daily).

5. Retrieving orbital elements

There's currently no API for this other than making direct SQL queries to the database, but the schema of the data is pretty obvious!

Author

This code was developed by Dominic Ford https://dcford.org.uk. It is distributed under the Gnu General Public License V3.