Drag to rotate the Earth. Use mouse wheel or the zoom buttons to change viewing distance.
Draft User Guide
OrbitScope Help
OrbitScope is an interactive satellite operations viewer. It combines a rotatable 3D Earth, live orbital propagation, constellation filters, ground-station overlays, visibility footprints, and alert hooks in a single browser surface.
Main use
Inspect live satellites
Best interaction
Search, rotate, filter, zoom
Operational views
Footprints, contacts, tracks
Data mode
Live cache + local fallback
What users can do
Core workflows
Select a satellite, inspect its orbit, view its approximate visibility footprint, compare families, and watch live motion against Earth and ground infrastructure.
Audience
Operators, analysts, demos
Useful for live demonstrations, quick constellation review, training, and operational intuition around altitude bands, tracks, and contact geometry.
Basics
How to use the globe
Search by name or click a satellite to highlight it and reveal orbit, footprint, and future track details.
Use Reset View to restore the default orientation and zoom level.
Controls
What each panel does
Right control panel
- Search all loaded satellites by name.
- Filter by constellation family and orbit band.
- Read altitude, orbital radius, inclination, and period.
- Adjust simulation speed and jump forward or backward in time.
- Show or hide ground stations and coverage cones.
- Filter ground stations by network.
- Refresh the live server-side satellite cache.
Lower detail panel
- Shows selected satellite metadata and live position.
- Displays current ground track and future path points.
- Lists next predicted station contacts.
- Provides alert configuration for visibility or altitude thresholds.
Visual Layers
What the map is showing
Families are color coded, for example Starlink in red, GPS in purple, weather systems in green, and stations in yellow.
When selected, a satellite shows a blinking Earth footprint based on geometric visibility with a fixed elevation mask.
Ground stations are drawn on Earth and their coverage geometry can be displayed for situational context.
What are names like White Sands, South Point, Guam, or Kourou?
Those are ground stations on Earth, not satellites. OrbitScope uses them as fixed Earth sites for communications, tracking, contact geometry, and station-visibility alerts. The named point is the station location, and the surrounding colored geometry shows approximate visibility or coverage context.
Analytics
What can be analyzed quickly
Constellation and orbit summaries
- LEO, MEO, GEO, and HEO counts
- Dominant family and family mix
- Median altitude of the filtered set
- Visible-on-screen count for the current view
Operational interpretation
- Identify dense orbital shells
- Compare coverage patterns by family
- Inspect how altitude affects footprint size
- Review likely ground visibility windows
Alerts
Alert modes
Arm an alert when the selected satellite becomes visible to any enabled station or a chosen station.
Arm an alert when the selected satellite drops below a configured altitude value.
If browser permission is granted, OrbitScope can raise a local notification when the alert condition is met.
Notes
Interpretation and limits
- Satellite positions are propagated from loaded orbital elements and rendered continuously in the browser.
- Selected satellite footprints are approximate visibility footprints, not payload-specific RF coverage maps.
- Ground-station contact logic uses a fixed elevation mask rather than a per-network antenna model.
- If live remote refresh is unavailable, OrbitScope falls back to cached or bundled data so the app remains usable.