Reading TLE’s

The Orbit class is used to simulate the orbits of satellites. It relies on orekit to simulate the position of satellites based on Two Line Elements (TLE) and on a linear interpolation to obtain a sufficiently fine time resolution while keeping compute time low enough.

A basic use of this class is as follows:

from orbitx import TLE
import numpy as np

tle = TLE.from_sat_shortname(
    "S6", np.datetime64("2020-02-01T00:00:00"), np.datetime64("2020-02-01T12:00:00")
)
print(tle)

TLE object for the satellite Sentinel-6 with short name S6.
Satellite catalog number: 46984.
Satellite classification: Unclassified.
Launch year: 2020.
Launch number: 87.
Launch piece: A.
Number of TLEs included: 1.
Reference date for dates in 'senconds since reference date': 1970-01-01T00:00:00.
Start date for the orbit to simulate: 2020-02-01T00:00:00.
End date for the orbit to simulate: 2020-02-01T12:00:00.
Created on 2026-01-06T13:20:26 using the version 1.0 of orbitx.