Welcome to TLE-tools’s documentation!¶
TLE-tools is a small library to work with two-line element set files.
Purpose¶
The purpose of the library is to parse TLE sets into convenient
TLE
objects, load entire TLE set files into
pandas.DataFrame
’s, convert TLE
objects
into poliastro.twobody.orbit.Orbit
’s, and more.
From Wikipedia:
A two-line element set (TLE) is a data format encoding a list of orbital elements of an Earth-orbiting object for a given point in time, the epoch. The TLE data representation is specific to the simplified perturbations models (SGP, SGP4, SDP4, SGP8 and SDP8), so any algorithm using a TLE as a data source must implement one of the SGP models to correctly compute the state at a time of interest. TLEs can describe the trajectories only of Earth-orbiting objects.
Here is an example TLE:
ISS (ZARYA)
1 25544U 98067A 19249.04864348 .00001909 00000-0 40858-4 0 9990
2 25544 51.6464 320.1755 0007999 10.9066 53.2893 15.50437522187805
Here is a minimal example on how to load the previous TLE:
from tletools import TLE
tle_string = """
ISS (ZARYA)
1 25544U 98067A 19249.04864348 .00001909 00000-0 40858-4 0 9990
2 25544 51.6464 320.1755 0007999 10.9066 53.2893 15.50437522187805
"""
tle_lines = tle_string.strip().splitlines()
t = TLE.from_lines(*tle_lines)
Then t
is:
TLE(name='ISS (ZARYA)', norad='25544', classification='U', int_desig='98067A',
epoch_year=2019, epoch_day=249.04864348, dn_o2=1.909e-05, ddn_o6=0.0, bstar=4.0858e-05,
set_num=999, inc=51.6464, raan=320.1755, ecc=0.0007999, argp=10.9066, M=53.2893,
n=15.50437522, rev_num=18780)
and you can then access its attributes like t.argp
, t.epoch
…
Links¶
Documentation: https://tletools.readthedocs.io
Releases: https://pypi.org/project/TLE-tools
Issue tracker: https://github.com/FedericoStra/tletools/issues