Orbital Focus - International Spaceflight Facts and Figures
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Orbits


Tyneside, UK
2025 Apr 28
Monday, Day 118

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Primary source of unclassified orbital elements

Orbital elements based on amateur observations
Sun-synchronous Satellites - Meteorology

This a list of metsats in sun-synchronous orbit. Names are not necessarily those by which they are known in the NORAD catalogue used by SpaceTrack.

It is a snapshot and is updated daily. The measure that results in an entry in this table is that the drift rate of LTDN (Local Time at the Descending Node) is no more than twenty four minutes each year. Some satellites may have higher drift rates but they may still be acceptable to their owners/operators. They do not appear here. On the converse, although a satellite is in a sun-synchronous orbit, it is not necessarily active.

Cubesats less than 6U in size are excluded from the list because the vast majority reached space by hitch hiking and their final orbit was not important. Listing them would create an unnecessarily long page.

The menu on the left leads to some, hopefully useful, sub-lists of the satellites on this page.

Updated: 2025 Apr 19, 04:48 UTC

LTDN Satellite Cat
no
Desig- nation Orbit
Epoch
Orbit

For the satellites that do not have formal published elements, thanks go to the radio and visual amateur satellite trackers for their observing, and particularly to Mike McCants for archiving the derived orbits.

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