Advanced Question Accuracy of determing ISS altitude over time using orbiter

[ISSAC_payload]

Hello,

I work for a payload onboard the ISS, ISSAC (International Space Station Agriculture Camera). As you can guess, we are essentially a camera (as shown in the acronym) and the altitude of the ISS plays a factor in how accurate/the quality of the images we take. As the ISS will be boosted to a higher altitude over the coming months, can Orbiter be used to model the altitude of the station and its deterioration over time? Any explanation or help would be welcome! Thanks!

 

[Izack]

If you are going to use this information professionally, then I would say no, there are better ways of obtaining this data from reality, I assume through NASA or the University of North Dakota which runs this project. AFAIK Orbiter is not geared for real scientific use, complex though its engine may be.

 

[Wishbone]

At the very least you can use STK...

 

[ISSAC_payload]

Thanks for the help, we do receive telemetry from NASA, however it is real time altitude and we don't have a means of of modeling the deterioration over time. STK as well, only shows the real time altitude. We were just wondering if using orbiter would be a legitimate source for a study, thanks!

 

[tblaxland]

Orbiter 2010 does include an exosphere model for Earth so it is much better than it used to be. It uses a constant solar flux as input though. You can read about in "Orbiter2010\Doc\Technotes\earth_atm.pdf". By the sounds of it, it would be better than what you've got at the moment . Presumably you have historical data already, so it would be interesting to see how accurate the Orbiter model is relative to the historical data. You could adjust the cross sections in the cfg file to adjust the drag to get a match in the slope of the data. There is a handy flight data recorder included in the base distribution that you can use to export the altitude.

Good luck!

 

[Mister Mxyzptlk]

Wow! That is really cool that they considered Orbiter for their data extrapolations.

 

[ISSAC_payload]

Thank you for the good words, I believe we are going to take a NRT (near real time) request from NASA for a known time period, model the beginning of the period through orbiter and see how accurate it is. At the very least orbiter is a load of fun! Thanks again

 

[billeinstein]

http://www.heavens-above.com/IssHeight.aspx
http://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=25544
Maybe we also need some regular orbit boosts in the sim.