NASA ISS Trajectory Data
NASA Johnson Space Center's Flight Operations Directorate publishes the International Space Station's operational trajectory openly: state vectors every four minutes in the mean equator and equinox of J2000, spanning fifteen days, in the CCSDS Orbit Ephemeris Message format. CONNECTED: the station's position, ground track and visible passes are computed from it.
Provider status
- Status
- connected
- Data shown
- none on this page — see /space-weather
- Licence
- Public domain (US Government work), NASA/JSC.
- Fetched at
- —
- Stale
- no
This is NASA ISS Trajectory Data's catalogue entry: what it is, what it serves, and under what terms. It carries no measurement — the live readings from this provider are fetched at request time and shown at /space-weather, each with the provider's own timestamp.
What it provides
- ISS state vectors (CCSDS OEM)
- Sub-satellite position & ground track
- Visible passes for an explicit observer
Limitations
Connected end-to-end since 2026-08-29. This is a predicted trajectory, not a measurement, and it ENDS: fifteen days after NASA generates it there is nothing, and the station manoeuvres, so no position is offered past the end of the file. It covers ONE satellite — no general catalogue of orbital elements is connected. The J2000-to-Earth-fixed transformation is verified against NASA's own ascending-node longitudes from the same file, agreeing to within a couple of metres; polar motion and the UT1 offset are not modelled and are together well under a kilometre.
Organisation & phenomena
Knowledge connections
- Associated withInternational Space Station
- Associated withNASA
Sources
The primary and reference sources this topic draws on.
- NASANational Aeronautics and Space Administration
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.