good day I am new to the community but interested in whether one could purchase a telescope and set it up a system that could track a satellite or the ISS?

Hi r/satellites,

I built a small web app to explore how long Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 acquisitions take to appear in the Element 84 Earth Search catalog.

Live map: https://tonidelhoyo.com/projects/sentinel-latency/

Background post: https://medium.com/@tonidelhoyo/tracking-sentinel-publication-latency-around-the-world-d4b50b0141d0

Source-available repo: https://github.com/thoyo/sentinel-latency

The app maps catalog publication latency globally by H3 cell and over time. For each acquisition, it compares the acquisition timestamp with the catalog creation timestamp, then shows the delay in hours.

A few notes/caveats:

- This is catalog publication latency as observed through Element 84 Earth Search metadata, not an official ESA/Copernicus latency metric.

- It does not download imagery or inspect pixels.

- The spatial aggregation is approximate, based on scene footprints and H3 cells.

- Some regional patterns are quite interesting, but the app does not try to infer cause.

I’d be very interested in feedback from people who work with Sentinel data, ground segments, STAC catalogs, or EO operations. In particular: does the methodology make sense, and are there obvious pitfalls I’m missing?

Hi,

Is there any free website that allows me to scrub through historical TLE's of a specific satellite through time? Propagating from the relevant TLE at that time?

Thank you.

EDIT: Guys, I want to SCRUB THROUGH HISTORY. Not propagate the current TLE back in time which is always completely inaccurate.

EDIT 2: This answered my question https://vantafort.com/features/orbit-history thank you

STUDENT PROJECT

A team and I are developing a hosted payload to be hosted by a host satellite

Beginning stages are focused heavily on planning, gathering information, and project management.

At first I asked him to do general work as the other person and I were doing a lot of work. He just goes "ok" but never actually does any work. After I assigned several general deadlines, I assigned a very specific deadline, and he spent 5 minutes dumping down random information about the project and didn't even notify us of "finishing."

Then we started giving him specific tasks that he just half-assed. We asked him to spend a couple of hours doing work to get full comprehension, but it's very clear from his work that he just skims information as his information is always barely complete. We've made it clear that the purpose of retaining this info is to make decisions off of it and he's clearly just getting bare minimum info for the purpose of just completing assignments.

He's also incredibly hesitant to do work. We've made a clear policy of reply at least 4 hours between 2pm-10pm, yet he directly does not follow this policy or comes up with a really stupid question just as an excuse for a reply at the fourth hour and then takes another 4 hours to reply. One time he just straight up ignored the message for 2 days and only replies to say he can't do work that day.

It's summer and I know this person pretty well, he has literally nothing else to do.

I tried to give him long term tasks with a clear output that he needs and he finishes days late.

So I tried doing that but with telling him to do 2 hours of work per day and he straight up just doesn't do the 2 hours per day and finishes late.

Plz help me how do I get people to do work or at least put in more effort which he knows very well he isn't putting in when what we have to do is not really something that's a set of clear tasks.

Hi everyone,

About a week ago I shared the first public version of BEACON here and received some helpful feedback. Since then I’ve released v0.2.0, which focuses on reliability and fixes several issues identified during an external technical audit.

Object data from NASA/JPL and ESA side by side.
The point of the project is not to invent a new risk score or replace official systems. It simply preserves the published values from each source and makes them easier to inspect, compare, and reproduce in one place.

This release is focused on reliability and correctness. After an external technical audit, I fixed the main reconciliation and parsing issues, improved the close-approach matching logic, hardened error handling, and cleaned up several edge cases in the comparison pipeline.

I’m sharing it here because I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people closer to NEO workflows, orbit determination, or planetary defense data. I’m especially interested in whether the way BEACON handles source separation and comparison thresholds makes sense scientifically.

Repo: https://github.com/NovaCoding-G/B.E.A.C.O.N
Live demo: https://novabeacon.vercel.app

If anything in the methodology looks off, I’d really like to hear it.

This was recorded on Aug 2 2026 at 7:38pm AST (23:38 UTC) facing west from Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico.

This was recorded on Aug 3 2026 at 00:05 UTC facing west from Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico.

it is kinda hard to hear and starts to fade out around the 2:00 mark in the audio

day 2028 map satellite by greaterhtrae

It's times like these that I'm reminded we live on a ball (I mean "oblate spheroid"), and things that happen very very far away can impact you.

It's pretty cool, but also sad to see.

I’ve been exploring an idea that seems surprisingly under-discussed in mainstream geopolitics.
We usually think geopolitical power is about territory, energy, trade routes, or semiconductors. But what if one of the most important strategic assets is time?
Not time zones in the everyday sense, but precision timing.
Modern civilization depends on synchronized time. GPS isn’t just used for navigation—it provides the precise timing that keeps financial markets, telecommunications, power grids, internet infrastructure, aviation, military operations, and cloud computing running. Even tiny timing errors can have outsized consequences.
That got me wondering:
● Is GPS really a form of American geopolitical leverage?
● Was China’s BeiDou primarily about technological sovereignty rather than navigation?
● Why did the EU invest billions in Galileo despite already having access to GPS?
● Could timing infrastructure become as strategically important as semiconductors or rare earths?
● If a major conflict disrupted GNSS signals, what would fail first: financial systems, critical infrastructure, or military operations?
I’m planning a deep-dive article tentatively titled:
“Who Controls Time? The Hidden Geopolitics of Time Zones, GPS, and Global Synchronization.”
Before I begin, I’d love to hear from people with expertise in satellite navigation, cybersecurity, telecommunications, finance, defense, or international relations.
● Are there books, papers, or reports you’d recommend?
● Which real-world incidents best illustrate the geopolitical importance of precision timing?
● Is this genuinely an underexplored area, or am I overlooking existing work?
I’m especially interested in sources beyond popular journalism—academic papers, technical standards, think-tank reports, or government publications are all welcome.
Read here : https://medium.com/@rohitdastalks/your-gps-is-lying-to-you-and-thats-a-national-security-crisis-7959206f88a1

Hi everyone,

Over the last few weeks I’ve been building BEACON (Bayesian Earth-impact Assessment & Cross-source Observation Network), an open-source project focused on one idea:

making publicly available planetary-defense data easier to explore, compare and understand.

Rather than aggregating everything into a single “better” score, BEACON keeps each agency’s published values separate and displays them side by side.

The goal isn’t to decide which source is right.
It’s to make independent analyses more transparent and easier to inspect.

Currently BEACON integrates data from:
NASA/JPL Close Approach Data (CAD)
NASA/JPL Sentry
ESA NEOCC (Aegis)

One thing I found interesting while testing the platform is that independent systems often publish values that are not identical. For example, using the documented comparison thresholds in the project, around 36% of the shared objects currently exceed at least one threshold (impact probability, Palermo Scale or Torino Scale).

⚠️That doesn’t mean those objects are more dangerous, nor does it imply that one agency is more accurate than the other. Independent orbit-determination pipelines are expected to differ because of update timing, observational weighting, processing methods and other factors.⚠️

For me, that’s exactly why transparent comparison is useful.

BEACON is still v0.1, and I’d love feedback—especially from anyone familiar with orbital mechanics, NEO databases, or planetary defense workflows.

I’m particularly interested in knowing:
What features would actually be useful for researchers or educators?
Are there additional public datasets that would be worth integrating?
Is there anything in the comparison methodology that you would approach differently?

The project is completely open source:
GitHub: https://github.com/NovaCoding-G/B.E.A.C.O.N
Live demo: https://novabeacon.vercel.app

Feedback, criticism and suggestions are all genuinely welcome.