ORBITALWiki
What each view shows and its filters, plus a glossary of the orbital and derived-data terms used across the site. For data sources, privacy and legal terms, see About.
App reference
Orbital Relay /orbit/
A cinematic 3D globe of the CelesTrak-tracked catalog. Toggle constellations by group (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, OneWeb, Starlink, and more), each rendered at its own real orbital position. Click any satellite for its telemetry — position, velocity, period, and orbital regime. Includes a past/future trajectory trail (1×, 3× or 5× the orbital period) and adjustable time rate.
Layer groups mirror CelesTrak's own GP group names — ACTIVE and MILITARY are the largest, at up to a few thousand rendered objects each (capped for frame rate).
Space-Track Catalog /spacetrack/
Search and render the full USSPACECOM catalog — every payload, rocket body and tracked fragment currently in orbit. Filter by object type, country, orbital regime, launch era, or operator; overlay a density heatmap, debris-family highlighting, launch-site markers, an age-since-launch color ramp, and LEO/MEO/HEO/GEO altitude shells.
Signal /spacetrack/signal/
Visibility windows, ground-track coverage, multi-day pass prediction (with an elevation-angle mask and minimum-duration filter), and an RF link budget — EIRP, path loss, G/T and signal margin — for any catalog object against any of a set of preset ground stations.
Conjunctions /spacetrack/conjunctions/
Derived close-approach screening between tracked objects, run in a background worker over a configurable time window and distance threshold. This is not an official conjunction data message (CDM) — it's a coarse screening pass over public element sets, intended for exploration, not operational maneuver decisions.
Brief /spacetrack/brief/
A daily rundown of catalog changes: new launches, reentries, and notable orbital events, written strictly from the day's ingested facts. Every numeral in the brief is checked against the underlying data before publishing — a sentence containing any number not present in the source facts, even a correct one, is rejected rather than shown.
Analytics /spacetrack/analytics/
Aggregate trends across the full catalog: launch history over time, debris-family breakdowns, and a country-by-decade launch matrix.
Starlink Constellation /starlink/
The full live Starlink shell — the largest single constellation in the catalog — rendered as orbital planes on its own dedicated globe.
Glossary
- TLE / GP element set
- A compact set of numbers describing a satellite's orbit at a specific reference time (its epoch) — inclination, eccentricity, mean motion, and so on. "TLE" (Two-Line Element) is the classic fixed-width text format; "GP" (General Perturbations) is the same underlying data in Space-Track's modern format. Both go stale as the satellite drifts from its last-known orbit, which is why fresh element sets matter.
- SGP4
- The standard orbital-propagation model used to turn a TLE/GP element set into a position and velocity at any given time, forward or backward from its epoch. Every position rendered on this site comes from an SGP4 propagation, not a stored coordinate.
- NORAD ID / catalog number
- The unique integer identifying a tracked object, assigned at cataloging and never reused.
- COSPAR ID / international designator
- The launch-based identifier in the form YYYY-NNNLLL (launch year, launch-of-year sequence, and a letter for each piece from that launch) — a different identity scheme from the NORAD ID, tied to the launch event rather than the object.
- Orbital regime — LEO / MEO / HEO / GEO
- Low, medium, highly-elliptical and geostationary/geosynchronous Earth orbit. On this site, regime is derived from an object's computed altitude, not a field Space-Track or CelesTrak reports directly.
- Operator (derived)
- The organization inferred to operate a satellite, guessed from its object name — not an authoritative registry field. Wherever it appears, it is labeled as derived; treat it as a best-effort label, not ground truth.
- Debris family
- A group of tracked fragments attributed to a single breakup or collision event (for example, the Cosmos 2251 collision debris), grouped by their shared parent event rather than by operator.
- Apogee / perigee
- An orbit's highest and lowest points above Earth's surface, in kilometers — computed from the element set's eccentricity and semi-major axis.
- RCS (radar cross-section)
- A coarse size class (small / medium / large) describing how visible an object is to ground-based radar — used as a rough proxy for physical size, not a precise measurement.
- Conjunction
- A predicted close approach between two tracked objects. This site's conjunction screening is a derived, unofficial pass over public element sets — see the Conjunctions reference above.
- Revs (orbital revolutions)
- How many orbital periods of trajectory are drawn around a selected satellite — 1×, 3× or 5× its own orbital period, shown as past (dashed) and future (solid) arcs.
- Time rate
- How fast simulated time advances relative to real time on the globe pages — 1×, 10×, 100× or 1000× realtime, i.e. that many simulated seconds pass per real second.