Space Command

The space command allows to compute the position of satellites and their passes above our head.

In order to do this, it uses the beyond library.

Installation

For the stable release

$ pip install space-command

For the latest development version

$ pip install git+https://github.com/galactics/beyond
$ pip install git+https://github.com/galactics/space-command

Features

• Retrieve orbits as TLE from Celestrak or Space-Track
• Compute visibility from a given point of observation
• Compute phases of the Moon and other solar system bodies
• Animated map of the orbit of satellites
• Compute events for a given satellite (day/night, node, AOS/LOS, etc.)
• Retrieve Solar System bodies ephemeris

See documentation for a list of all the features.

Changelog

[0.7.3] - 2023-08-19

Added

• Python 3.11 support
• space tle displays total insertions from celestrak
• space station creation can now handle negative coordinates
• space log show current versions of beyond and space-command

Modified

• Subcommands are now listed without discrimination between official and third-party entry points.

Removed

• Python 3.6 support

[0.7.2] - 2022-10-14

Added

• Python 3.9 and 3.10 support
• Option to force CCSDS format (XML or KVN)
• space map add pause button
• space passes elevation graph
• space log colorized log
• space tle now parses GP data instead of old-style files
• space tle now inserts tles in chuncks to avoid sqlite locks (@hamarituc)

[0.7.1] - 2020-09-13

Modified

• follow beyond refactoring of listeners

[0.7] - 2020-08-11

Added

• space tle history range selection
• wspace backup command to create, list and restore workspaces backups
• orb2circle() function to quickly compute the circle of visibility of a spacecraft
• space opm and space oem commands for OPM and OEM handling.
• tox passes command-line arguments to pytest if provided after --

Modified

• refactoring of space map, as a subpackage
• parse_date() tries both default date format ("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S" and "%Y-%m-%d"), allowing for more relaxed dates command arguments
• refactoring space sat with documentation on each function

Removed

• space ephem is replaced by space oem
• space station does not allow interactive station creation anymore

[0.6] - 2020-01-01

Added

• black code style
• Retrieve available pages from Celestrak
• Parse time scale of a datetime argument (i.e. "2020-01-01T14:36:00 TAI")
• wspace can list and restore backups
• space planet display the download progress
• Support of Python 3.8
• space events can compute Argument Of Latitude, and specific stations events
• space map command arguments to start at a given date, disable ground track or disable visibility circle

Modified

• Sat.from_selector take a single selector and return a single Sat instance. Use Sat.from_selectors() for a generator.
• Refactoring the space.tle module into a subpackage

Fixed

• Correction of sorting algorithm for space tle
• space passes header
• Support of environment variable to set a proxy, even in async code
• map does not crash when an ephemeris is out of bound

Removed

• Support of python 3.5
• Unused imports

[0.5] - 2019-07-30

Added

• space map shows groundtrack
• space events can selectively display one type of event
• space sat subcommand to handle the satellite database
• space ephem subcommand to handle ephemerides
• wspace for workspace management
• space passes now has a csv output format
• space planet is able to fetch any bsp file defined in the config file

Modified

• Time span inputs normalized for all commands (20s, 3d12h5m, etc.)
• Satellites can now be accessed by other identifiers than name (norad=25544 and cospar=1998-067A are equivalent to "ISS (ZARYA)"). See space sat
• Logging is now with a timed rotating file

[0.4.2] - 2019-02-23

Added

• Logging
• Tests
• space events subcommand computes all orbital events of a satellite (AOS/LOS, Apogee/Perigee, etc.)
• space phase to compute the phase of available planets and moons
• groundtracks optional on map

Removed

• space moon subcommand. This is now handled by the more generic space phase

[0.4.1] - 2018-11-01

Added

• TLE database dump and statistics
• Station map
• Stations' characteristics defined in config file are now set as attributes of the station object

[0.4] - 2018-10-20

Added

• Compute ephemeris of solar system bodies (Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Titan, etc.)
• Moon phase computation
• Centralized date handling, via command space clock
• Allow TLE retrieval from Space-Track

Changed

• Database classes are now suffixed with Db
• Subcommand retrieving data from the web now use the argument fetch instead of get.

Removed

• Light propagation delay no longer taken into account. The computation was tedious, and has been removed from the beyond library

[v0.3] - 2018-07-24

Added

• Possibility to create your own commands with the space.command entry point.
• Search TLE containing a string
• Retrieve all chronological TLE of an object
• space map displays real-time position of objects
• Compute moon phase
• Every command taking object names can also take TLE or CCSDS ephemeris via stdin
• add mask handling for stations
• Passes zenithal display optional

Changed

• MIT license replace GPLv3

Removed

• EOP database disabled by default.