@danoastro.bsky.social
Here are examples of good alignment (just spot-checking directly in the Spacebook Explorer tool...
22.10.2024 14:52 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0, which again indicates that the orbit planar orientation has uncertainties.
Cases where this can happen include:
-- The vehicle did a cross-plane maneuver, which the ISS potentially could have done.
-- The observations don't nail down the orbit plane, due to a lack of geographic diversity.
This can be an indication that the orbit solution has uncertainties in orbit inclination, as you can see in the example figure below. It can additionally be instructive to enable viewing of the velocity covariance as well (red ellipsoids in the figure)
22.10.2024 14:47 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Example of TLE and SP covariance ellipsoids.
Hi Jonathan - great question.
The synthetic covariance process does largely track the in-track direction, but there are cases where it can be offset from in-track direction for the major axis of the error ellipsoid.
