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Visibility

Satcat's Ground Visibility feature allows operators to create a predicted pass schedule for satellites over selected ground locations. This feature can be used both for planning contact windows with ground stations as well as predicting passes for ground-based sensors.

Primary Data Sources​

Satcat supports several data source types to define the spacecraft's trajectory for visibility analysis:

  • A TLE (Two-Line Element) set
  • An Ephemeris ID from the Satcat Ephemeris Repository

Observers​

Visibility requests predict the visibility windows of one or more observers to selected satellites. An observer might be a ground station or a sensor location. Observers can be defined in the following ways:

  • Ground Station: A simple ground station defined by latitude, longitude, and altitude, with an optional maximum elevation angle.
  • UDL Sensor Location: A sensor defined using the Unified Data Library (UDL) sensor API. UDL sensors allow complex sensor visibility constraints in azimuth/elevation space to be defined for each sensor.

Creating a Visibility Request​

Visibility Requests can be created using the Satcat API or Satcat SDK.