Learn the terms

Every object that is tracked in orbit, satellites, spent rocket stages, and debris, gets a unique number in the US catalog, called its NORAD catalog number (or SATCAT number). The International Space Station is 25544.

It never changes for the life of the object, so it is the most reliable way to look one up. OrbitalWiki uses it as the primary key for every record.

The COSPAR ID (also called the international designator) encodes when the object went up. The ISS is 1998-067A: launched in 1998, the 67th launch of that year, piece A.

Objects from the same launch share the year-and-launch part and differ only in the trailing letter, which is how OrbitalWiki groups "same launch" objects together.

A TLE (Two-Line Element set) is the classic fixed-width text format that describes an orbit. It is compact and widely supported by tracking software, but cramped and easy to mis-parse.

OMM (Orbit Mean-elements Message) is the modern, structured (KML/JSON/XML) equivalent carrying the same numbers with clear field names. OrbitalWiki can hand you either for any object with current elements.

Orbits are always changing, so a set of orbital elements is only a snapshot taken at one instant, that instant is the epoch. Propagating from the epoch tells you where the object is at other times.

The further you get from the epoch, the less accurate the prediction. OrbitalWiki flags elements whose epoch is more than a few days old as stale, so you never mistake an old snapshot for a fresh one.

LEO (Low Earth Orbit, up to ~2,000 km) is where most satellites and the ISS fly. MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) is home to navigation systems like GPS. GEO (Geostationary, ~35,786 km) keeps a satellite fixed over one spot on Earth, used for weather and communications.

HEO (Highly Elliptical Orbit) is a stretched path that swings far out and back in. OrbitalWiki lets you filter the whole catalog by any of these bands.

No orbit is a perfect circle. Apogee is the farthest point of the orbit from Earth; perigee is the closest. The bigger the gap between them, the more elliptical the orbit.

For a near-circular orbit like the Hubble Space Telescope, apogee and perigee are close together. OrbitalWiki shows both for every object with orbital elements.

A CubeSat is a miniature satellite built to a standard size: one unit ("1U") is a 10 cm cube, and larger ones stack units (3U, 6U, and so on). The standard makes them cheap to build and launch, which is why universities and small teams use them.

Many CubeSats carry amateur-radio payloads and are operated by student teams. They still get a NORAD number and a full catalog record like any other object.

The operator is the organization responsible for commanding and using a satellite day to day, a company, space agency, university, or military. It is not always the same as the country of registration or the manufacturer.

Operator names are messy across sources (abbreviations, mergers, subsidiaries), so OrbitalWiki reconciles them and lets you see every object an operator runs.

OrbitalWiki combines several sources: CelesTrak for orbital elements, GCAT (J. McDowell) for launch and classification data, and Wikidata for enrichment. They do not always agree, an operator name or launch date can differ between them.

Rather than silently pick one, OrbitalWiki stores each value as a claim tied to its source, and when claims conflict it shows the disagreement and marks the field accordingly. Nothing is invented to paper over a gap.

Operational status describes the object's working state: operational, non-operational, decayed (reentered), and a few in-between states like standby or spare. It is different from whether the object is still in orbit.

Status is often the least certain field, because operators rarely announce retirements. OrbitalWiki shows the status it has along with how confident that value is, and never upgrades a guess to a fact.

Every transmitting satellite uses specific radio frequencies and modes to send telemetry or relay signals. Amateur-radio (ham) satellites publish theirs so operators on the ground can receive them, and Doppler shift means the frequency appears to slide slightly as the satellite passes overhead.

Structured transmitter and pass data is not in the OrbitalWiki catalog yet (it is planned), so the example below is an amateur-radio CubeSat record rather than a frequency table.

Every claim carries one of five confidence levels: confirmed, high, medium, low, or conflicting. "Confirmed" means multiple trusted sources agree; "conflicting" means they do not. The most-trusted claim is shown as the value, with the others still visible.

Each record also has an overall data-quality score built from concrete signals, whether the operator, country, launch date, object type, active status, and orbital elements are known. It is a completeness measure, not a judgement of importance.