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> As I say in the post, you shouldn't use this for docking operations.

Brilliant. :-D



You totally could use it for docking. A real ISS docking manoeuvre takes several hours. Orbits are very predictable and I'm quite confident that the error you'd get projecting your orbit 15min into the future would be good enough to get within close radar range for the final approach. In fact you probably could do it, even if your spavecraft doesnt have DNS at all, and you have to do the DNS resolve from a ground laptop before you board it. Soyez can dock within 3 hours of lauch. Orbits are very predictable in this timeframe.


If there's no timestamp, all you know is a Lat/Long that was accurate sometime in the last 15 minutes (or more, "best effort basis"). But you don't know when, and you don't know the altitude. That's gonna make using that information for docking...difficult.


I shall make the suggestion to NASA that they start using this ;-)


Sure they're predictable, but since you don't get the exact timestamp for those expired coordinates, it's still useless.

Oh, and accuracy is shit anyway (altitude is rounded to 10m)




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