The orbital Context card is gone and the Contact card stays hidden in orbit
again. Live Signals page 1 had nothing in orbit but TRACK ACQUIRED, because
orbit feeds no Contacts snapshot; it now lists what is around the
satellite, built the way the aircraft rows are, five rows with stable keys
rebuilt once a second. Rows already shown keep their places while they
still qualify, so a site passing under a low orbit is not pulled from under
the pointer.
Site rows come from the Mapped Installations layer (getNearby, asked only
as far as the reach extends) and focus their site, or release it on the
focused site's row, which reads as the subject does. A site the layer drops
during its frequent reloads stays listed for 10 s, since sites do not move.
With the layer off nothing is listed and a SITES STANDBY row says why.
Satellite rows come from the satellites layer's bounded nearest query,
measured from the satellite itself, and ride the satellite; RETURN goes
back to the one before, skipping one that has left the catalogue. While
the camera hops to a new satellite only TRACK ACQUIRED and RETURN show, so
nothing is measured from the old position. An arrow pressed while a focus
eases back takes the arrows' own clock. Site and satellite rows name their
own actions.
getNearestPositions makes one bounded pass over the shown points, keeps the
nearest few in a short sorted list and reads latitude and longitude for
those alone, leaving out dense extras, asked-for ids and classes such as
debris. A caller that wants the nearest handful no longer builds and sorts
an entry for every satellite.
getById returns a loaded installation with its drawn position, as getNearby
does, without selecting it; findByPick resolves a scene pick (a named
marker's installationId or a site entity) the way the layer's own click
selection reads it. Both return null while the layer is off.
In the orbital view a double-click on a mapped ground point went on to
Cesium's own double-click, which tracks the picked entity and so ended the
view. The Cockpit's double-click routing now takes it in orbit: it keeps or
starts the focus on that point (a point beyond the reach is left unfocused
but still not tracked). A double-click anywhere else, one a tool owns, and
every one outside orbit go on to Cesium's as before, and stopping the
Cockpit still hands Cesium's handler back.
In the satellite orbital view a single click on a mapped ground point (a
ground point of a layer that is on, such as a Mapped Installations site, a
fire or a local data pack feature) keeps the camera on it. Each frame the
look is aimed from the satellite's position to the point's Earth-fixed
position in the track-up nadir frame the arrows tilt, so the point stays
at the centre as the satellite moves. The swing onto the point, or between
points, uses the arrows' easing on a slower clock and then holds the point
exactly; reduced motion cuts.
A click elsewhere, FOCUS on the focused point, NADIR, Home or 0 ends the
focus and the view eases back to nadir; an arrow ends it and tilts on from
where the view is. The focus also ends, easing back, when the point leaves
the ±45° reach or the satellite's horizon, when its layer is turned off or
its record is dropped, and with the view. While focused the readout gives
the single off-nadir angle to the point (OFF-NADIR 23.4°), names it in a
polite live region, and the swath reads approximate as for a tilt. Clicks
still reach Cesium's own handler and never untrack the satellite; a click
a tool owns is ignored.
Under the readout, IN REACH lists the mapped points facing the satellite
that are within the reach or in the frame, nearest to nadir first and at
most 12, rebuilt once a second. A row opens the point's position, source
and OpenStreetMap tags (or its layer's properties); FOCUS focuses it,
switches to it, or ends the focus held on it, and is unavailable for a
point in frame but beyond the reach.
The Orbital view section said the zoom stops at 8x. It now covers the
16x to 128x steps for satellites with a confirmed sensor swath, capped
from live altitude, the mouse wheel, the SENSOR button, the to-scale
swath strip and readout (approximate off nadir), the imagery pre-load
ahead of the ground track, the TLE age on the identifier line, and that
the sensor values cite operator and agency pages per platform.
An imaging satellite with a known sensor can now zoom past 8x, up to 128x,
as far as the view stays at least as wide as the sensor's narrowest
standard swath at its live altitude; only swaths confirmed on a cited page
open those steps. The top step follows the altitude and window shape and
steps back when it falls below the zoom shown.
The view draws the sensor's swath to scale along the ground track with a
SENSOR SWATH readout (approximate off nadir), and a SENSOR button zooms to
exactly that width when it lies in range at nadir. From 16x the imagery
tiles the view will need 5 to 20 s ahead along the ground track are
pre-loaded at the matching level. The mouse wheel steps the zoom one notch
at a time, and the identity line shows how old the TLE is. The sensor
figures come from a new bundled pack of 46 Earth-observation platforms,
each value cited to its operator or agency, with its own data credit.
With a satellite tracked and no aircraft tracked, Cockpit can ride the
satellite. Entry needs only the Satellites layer; debris can be tracked but
not entered, and voice stays aircraft-only. Double-clicking the tracked
satellite or the entry buttons (reading ORBIT) enter it.
The camera sits on the satellite's per-frame SGP4 position and looks
straight down, turned to the ground track (north-up for a satellite with
none). The optical zoom steps 1x to 8x with a focus pull, the arrows tilt
the view up to 45 degrees off nadir, and Home or 0 returns to nadir. Off
nadir the tilt reads its total angle first and the swath readout becomes an
approximation marked with ≈. While in orbit the map leases flat Esri
imagery, the cloud pass stays off and the view opens in the optical style.
The orbital HUD names the satellite with its owner's flag (from the
flag-icons package, loaded per country) or an organisation badge, its
operator, class, NORAD and COSPAR ids and TLE epoch with the element lines
on request, altitude, orbital speed and the sub-satellite point. CURRENTLY
OVER names the country and its first-level division, or the sea, and from
8x the most prominent populated place nearby, looked up offline from the
bundled Natural Earth packs (populated places are a new pack). The
satellites layer hides the ridden satellite's own marks, dims the other
orbit rings and ignores scene clicks and Escape while held. Exit restores
the camera's field of view and the satellite's follow camera.
C no longer enters or leaves Cockpit, bridge or orbit: it is left to the
app-wide CCTV shortcut, and Escape or the exit button leave first person.
The orbital view reads a satellite's owner country, operator, COSPAR id,
TLE epoch and whether its class can be ridden. #1558 now carries only
what the class toggles read, so this brings the rest back here, where it
is first used: the classes.js helpers and the UCS pack's operator and
owner fields.
Class toggles only hid points: with Stations off the ISS's orbit ring and
its label still drew, and each catalog refresh showed the ring again. The
ring and label now follow the ISS's class, and the tracked card no longer
names a docked companion whose class is hidden.
A failed Starlink load reverted to the core catalog without applying class
visibility again, so the core catalog's own Starlink points stayed on while
the chip, legend and lists said Starlink was off, and classes.starlink kept
reading true. Both are put right on failure.
Deduplication kept only the first group's tag, so a recent imaging
satellite in both visual and resource, with no UCS record or known name,
fell to Probes. The catalog entry now keeps every group, and the
last-resort class is the first of them that names one.
SATCAT groups merged in group order, so a stale cached copy read later
overwrote a current record of the same object: a satellite SATCAT now
calls dead stayed in Imaging. A stale copy no longer overrules a current
read, from the same merge or an earlier one.
Only catalog and the tracked satellite were saved for the layer, so a class
chip lasted until the next reload and no share link carried it. The choice
is now the satellites option `classes`: one letter per class shown
(`sitpd` by default, `0` for none), with Starlink left to `catalog`, and
the layer takes the letters back through setParams. A partial request
(`{debris: false}`) hides only what it names.
Both CelesTrak routes shared one cooldown, and any failure set it: one bad
SATCAT answer made /api/celestrak return 502 "cooling down" for a minute,
failing the Starlink load and stalling every TLE group past its cache.
Throttling (403/429) still holds both routes off, since CelesTrak throttles
the client; any other failure holds off only the route that failed.
Showing only Stations and Imaging by default hid GPS, GEO comsats, Hubble
and the rest of what the layer showed before classes, for every existing
user and saved view. Every class now starts on except Starlink, which stays
off as the DENSE switch was.
The satellites layer now sorts every object into Stations, Imaging,
Telecom, Starlink, Probes or Debris, each with a chip and a live count on
the layer row. Stations and Imaging show by default; the Starlink chip is
the former DENSE catalog switch. Hidden classes keep their points, so a
toggle needs no reload, and they leave the detection overlay and the voice
position lists.
A class comes, strongest evidence first, from CelesTrak SATCAT (object type
and status, served by a new /api/celestrak-satcat/<group> proxy route and
cached for a day), the bundled UCS Satellite Database pack (operator, owner
country and purpose), name patterns for later launches, and the CelesTrak
group. The core catalog also reads the resource, weather, planet, sar and
science groups. Payloads with no evidence of life launched 20 or more years
ago are filed as debris. The UCS pack, its build script and its data credit
are added.
Sameh Khamis