Visualizing Orbits

Orbit visualization with Dash

After discovering the ability to convert a TLE to Orbit using TLE-tools, I went spelunking and learned something really helpful: how to plot orbits in order to visualize them! This is what the orbit for the example TLE I retrieved from SpaceTrack looks like:

That plot is currently available at api.thiago.pub:9091. I plan on making this a little more interesting, creating a simple UI to allow entering a TLE and getting back the decoded version, the textual representation for the corresponding orbit (using my space-api), and a link to the visualization.

Here’s what I learned by spelunking into the code. TLE-tools relies on poliastro to convert a TLE to poliastro.twobody.orbit.Orbit. poliastro is a library for interactive Astrodynamics and Orbital Mechanics, which I’ll definitely be exploring further.

poliastro uses Dash to plot orbits. Dash is a framework for data applications, built on top of plotly.js, React and Flask. plotly.py is an interactive, browser-based graphing library for Python, based on ploty.js.

These are pretty impressive, powerful libraries that I’m glad to be aware of now!