iridium

Iridium study

Arnaud Muller 2022/2023

Generate Iridium states files

• iridium_TLE_sync Get the latest TLEs of the Iridium NEXT constellation from CelesTrak and sync them to the same epoch with SGP4.
• iridium_propagation.py Perform the propagation of the entire constellation alongside TOLOSAT chunk by chunk and export the states to pickle files.

Analyze Iridium states to find visibility windows

• iridium_doppler For each propagation chunk and for each satellite, compute the Doppler shift and rate and check when they are below the threshold while geometrical visibilty conditions are satisfied.
• iridium_analysis Use the results of the previous script to create plots.

Visualize results

• iridium_visualization A propagation of TOLOSAT and the Iridium constellation with an automatic generation of the VTS file.

Final results

Doppler shift & rate of example satellite