During the latest launch of STS - 124 and successful docking the Space Shuttle Discovery I thought it might be interesting to hunt around the world wide web and see if I could find a site that allowed real time tracking of the ISS, Shuttle, etc.
I remember back in to the days of Mir, the manned Russian space station (which still holds the record for the longest human presence in space), that a program that predicted the path of the station existed and users could watch it as it passed over the orbital track on a computer screen.
At night if a strong enough telescope was available, it was possible to view the station orbiting the earth using the computer generated track as a reference as reference to Mir’s position in the sky
I have found that Google Maps offer such a service with their Google Sat Track. Google Sat Track allows you to view in real time the position of the ISS, Space Shuttle, Soyuz capsule and the Hubble telescope.
The website is algorithm based and allows for the user to either click on the pre programmed positions of the spacecraft mentioned above or enter customised data to track anything orbiting the Earth with an orbit of less than 5800 km. The site states that they will be expanding to facilitate satellites having a higher altitude than this soon.
All that is necessary is to obtain up to date Keplerian elements and enter them into the program. Those elements are available at: http://celestrack.com.
The tracking site also shows the latitude, longitude, altitude and velocity of the desired vehicle. To view and play around with this interesting web based program go to :
http://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/tracking/index.html
GoogleSatTrack v3.0 - 2008.03.01
by Isana Kashiwai
