International Space Station Orbit Tracker

There’s a growing movement of people who believe that our space agencies are underfunded (see: Penny4NASA) because humanity is just not paying enough attention to our present accomplishments and future plans in space exploration. Well, I know one way to direct attention to something: Point at it. This is the first prototype of the International Space Station Desktop Orbit Tracker. The pointer is controlled by an ST Microelectronics Nucleo F401, an "arduino-compatible" development board, which performs the orbital propagation and coordinate system transformations using a ported version of the SGP4 model and drives an Adafruit motor shield. A stepper motor controls the azimuth and a servo controls the elevation. The Station orbits the earth every 90 minutes so the speed of motion is roughly equivalent to a minute hand on a clock: slow enough that it’s not really interesting to watch, but fast enough that it’s in a new place every time you glance over. I’ve got lots of ideas for extensions of this design, including: Trophies for aerospace-related awards Keeping track of cubesats in high school classrooms Amateur radio antenna mounts A children’s museum exhibit where you can select between satellites, planets, and landmarks to point at Making a huge one as an outdoor art installation. For this prototype, though, I just wanted it to simply point: a reminder that the world’s full of incredible things if you just know what direction to look. Thanks for watching and let me know what you think! The code: https://github.com/gradyh/ISS-Trackin... Watch this video and the entire Practical Engineering catalog ad-free on Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/practical-engine... ------------------------------------------------------------ Resources for learning more: https://celestrak.com/columns/ https://celestrak.com/software/vallad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplif... ----------------------------------------------------------- Music: Doctor Vox - Gold (   • DOCTOR VOX - Gold [Royalty Free Music]  )