PassFinder Applet: predict passes of satellites and show details of the passes

Joachim Köppen Strasbourg 2010

Short User's Guide

• Select the satellite, select the Station or enter its geographical data
• Select the time: 'now' or enter the time
• Choose for how many days you like the predictions, and specify the lower limit for the maximum elevation
• (In case you are watching a newly launched satellite, using a preliminary TLE, but there is simply a time delay of the launch, enter that delay (in minutes) and click on the appropriate button to make it green.
• (If you want to inspect the passes of a satellite for which you happen to have the TLE, select that option. In the textarea that will appear simply paste your data (but add a first line with the name ...)
• Click compute to get the predictions

  

  This text you may copy and paste into a text editor for further use of the predictions (e.g. import in Excel). Please note that depending on the fonts used by your web browser, the horizontal alignment of the text may be imperfect, as shown here ;-)

• If you want to see the ground track of the orbit for the pass at 06:34, click on Pass: Plots

  

  The red part of the track shows when it is visible from the station (the blue dot). The blue open circle indicates the equator crossing for this pass. To see any other plot, choose the parameters to be displayed as x and y. Clicking on the plot displays the x and y-values of the clicked position. Click 'drag & zoom' then drag the mouse over a rectangle will show this zoomed view.

  To see the same plot for the next or the previous pass, click on the respective navigation buttons ...
• If you want to see the details of the selected pass, click on Pass: Textoutput:

  

  This text table you may copy and paste into a text editor for further use of the predictions (e.g. import in Excel). Please note that depending on the fonts used by your web browser, the horizontal alignment of the text could be less perfect than shown here!

• If you want to view the ground track, as seen from looking down on the North Pole, click on Pass: LongLat:

  

  The small triangle indicates AOS.

• To see how the satellite traverses the sky above the station, click on Pass: AzEl:

  

  The small triangle indicates AOS. A red dot may indicate a problem for those rotators whose range is only from 0 to 360 degrees in azimuth, as the satellite would cross the northern meridian, and the azimuth rotator would need to make a time-consuming complete turn to recapture the satellite.

• You may also inspect the TLE data in detail, by clicking on the TLE button:

  

  This gives the explanations of the parameters. You may alter the data, but it important that you keep the same format - as also indicated. Then click on modify TLE button to see the predictions done with the changed parameters. This current TLE is written onto the textarea accessible by choosing enter your TLE. You may alter it here, too, or copy and paste it for use in other programs ...

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last update: March 2011 J.Köppen