This Project intends the development of the software Salletracker II for tracking artificial satellites, starting from the present version of the project SalleTracker.
We will follow the future lines already started in the previous project and will improve the software adding more functionalities and eliminating defects in order to grant a reliable system, a very competitive one that will be able to manage the terrestrial station that will follow the satellite Sallesat-I.
First of all, we’ll export the previous project to the new program language Visual Basic.Net.
Some of the functionalities that can be added are the following ones:
Viewing more than one satellite at the same time on the display.
Change the tracking of one satellite in direct visibility to another automatically.
Getting a list of the next passes of any satellite going to pass above an observer and get it in a text form..
Displaying the area in direct view from the satellite in a map.
Improving the antenna pointing system.
An artificial satellite is not more that en object placed in orbit by man around a planet. The principle that keeps it up and not falling down as any other object attracted bye the Earth isdue to the fact that the centripetal force of the gravity is compensated by the centrifugal force applied by the constant revolution of the satellite, in such a way that both forces are nullified one by the other, what makes en apparent no gravity sensation.
There are several different orbital types a satellite can be following and they could be classified by their height above a planet and its geometrical form; each of them has its advantages and inconvenient, and some are more adequate than others for some applications, depending of the “turns” they make each day and the planet zone we are interested they surpass.
The main project’s objective is to enable us to communicate with our Sallesat-I satellite, in view to the fact that this is not a geostationary satellite and it has en orbital movement. That’s why we need predicting its movement and to be able of pointing the antennas to it all time, in order to be sure that we are always pointing to it with the maximum gain of the antenna, and getting the maximum signal received and the maximum transmitted power.
This project pretends to give a good solution to all these problems, giving us some software tools to predict the orbital movement of the satellite and the right direction for pointing the antenna from any place of the planet, to any artificial satellite we have Keplerian defined elements (the Keplerian elements determine the exact orbital characteristics described by the flying object, so we can predict with a certain exact rate the actual position of the satellite in a stated time), in any orbit it describes.
Note: If you want to see the present version of SalleTracker II, you could see it on the web page:www.infonegocio.com/movilsound/
Satellite segment
