Teach and learn with a live satellite catalog
Lessons, datasets, and research methods built on OrbitalWiki's real, source-backed catalog. Pick a path below, search the lessons, or start with a student project.
Start with the learner
Choose the closest teaching context. You can refine the lesson list afterwards.
Secondary school
Ages 11–18. Short, self-contained activities using real satellite records.
Undergraduate aerospace
Orbit regimes, catalogs, and the identifiers that tie datasets together.
Data science
Joining, cleaning, and reasoning about a real, imperfect public catalog.
Computer science
Working with a public REST API, keys, and structured provenance data.
Amateur radio
Finding spacecraft, receiving responsibly, and planning passes from current orbital elements.
Research methods
Provenance, conflicting sources, and citing an evolving dataset honestly.
Choose a lesson
Filter by learner group, then narrow by topic, level, or time. Every card opens the full lesson.
9 lessons
- Upper secondary and early undergraduate (ages 15+) · 50 min
Why Low Orbits Decay
Atmospheric drag never stops acting in low Earth orbit. Students read the drag term and perigee from real records, rank objects by how fast they will come down, and learn why the answer is a band rather than a date.
dragdecayreentrybstarspace-weatherperigee - Early undergraduate aerospace and remote sensing · 55 min
Sun-Synchronous Orbits and the Overpass Time
Earth’s equatorial bulge turns an orbit plane. Choose the inclination so that it turns at exactly one revolution per year and the satellite crosses the equator at the same local solar time forever. Students verify the signature on real records.
sun-synchronousinclinationprecessionremote-sensinglocal-solar-time - Early undergraduate and senior secondary · 55 min
The Geostationary Belt Is a Finite Address Space
Geostationary orbit is a single circle at a fixed radius, so a satellite’s address is one number: its longitude. Students compute how much room a station-keeping box really is, then discover that not everything labelled GEO is holding still.
geostationaryorbital-slotsitustation-keepingcatalog-literacy - Introductory programming, data engineering, or A-level computing · 55 min
When a Catalog Number Outgrows Its Format
The Two-Line Element format reserves exactly five characters for the catalog number. The catalog passed 99,999. This lesson makes that abstract lesson about fixed-width fields concrete, with an endpoint that really does return an error.
data-formatstleommidentifiersapilegacy-systemserror-handling - Introductory programming and web APIs · 50 min
Paginate and Back Off Politely
Any dataset worth having is bigger than one response. Learn to walk a paginated endpoint, respect the limits the server tells you about, and write a retry loop that recovers instead of making the outage worse.
apipaginationrate-limitinghttpbackoffethics - Introductory data science and research methods · 60 min
Match Records Across Two Catalogs
Joining by name looks easy and fails quietly. Joining by identifier works until you ask who issued the identifier and what they meant by it. Students build a match table with an explicit confidence for every row.
entity-resolutionjoinsidentifiersprovenancedata-quality - Senior secondary and undergraduate research methods · 50 min
How Many Satellites Are There?
Every published satellite count answers a slightly different question. Rather than looking up "the" number, students collect several, work out which question each one answers, and produce a claim that survives being checked.
definitionscountingprovenancecitationdynamic-datamedia-literacy - Introductory data science · 55 min
Catalog Data Quality Check
Build a small, honest quality report from a catalog subset. Missing and conflicting values are findings, not values to silently replace.
data-qualitymissing-dataprovenancereproducibility - Secondary school and early undergraduate (ages 14+) · 45 min
Understanding NORAD and COSPAR Identifiers
Every tracked object carries two names: a NORAD catalog number and a COSPAR International Designator. This lesson teaches students to read both, and to see why one encodes a launch and the other does not.
identifierscatalogsnoradcosparmetadata
Educator resources
Notebooks
Jupyter notebooks that run against the live OrbitalWiki API. Every request in them is real and was executed before publication. Download one, open it in Jupyter, run it top to bottom.
All notebooksDataset downloads
Use versioned dataset releases for reproducible coursework.
Browse datasetsCitation guide
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Request a languageInstructor packs
The Satellite Science Unit Pack collects all 17 lessons into one printable document, with every worksheet, answer key and figure included, under a licence that covers a single classroom or family. Every lesson stays free to read and download on its own.
Student project ideas
Identifier detective
Pick ten satellites, record both identifiers from their record pages, and explain what each identifier does and does not tell you. Builds directly on the identifiers lesson.
Orbit-regime census
Use the catalog's orbit-class data to count how many active objects sit in LEO, MEO, GEO and HEO, and write up what the distribution implies about how space is used today.
Provenance audit
Find a satellite whose record shows conflicting or unverified fields, then trace each claim to its source and confidence. A concrete introduction to data provenance.