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AsteriaStar
Live · NASA Johnson Space Center

Live satellite data

One satellite is tracked here in real time, and that is the honest result of checking what is actually available rather than a first step towards more.

The station right now

Live

  • 16.7° S

    Latitude

  • 155.0° E

    Longitude

  • 422km

    Altitude

  • 92.9min

    Orbital period

    measured from the ephemeris

Full position, ground track and verification → · When it crosses your sky →

The section

  • The ISS

    Where the station is right now, from NASA's own trajectory file.

  • Passes

    When it crosses your sky — computed in your browser, from coordinates you type.

  • Bright satellites

    What is actually visible to the naked eye, and what makes it so.

  • Constellations

    The large satellite constellations, and the state of live data for them.

Providers

  • NASA ISS Trajectory Data

    Connected

    NASA Johnson Space Center, Flight Operations Directorate (TOPO)

    Public domain (US Government work), NASA/JSC.

    A static file on NASA's public-data store, regenerated every few days. No key, no documented rate limit. AsteriaStar fetches it at most once every six hours, which is far less often than it changes.

    This is the operational trajectory the station's flight controllers use, not a two-line element set: state vectors every four minutes in the mean equator and equinox of J2000, spanning fifteen days. It ENDS. Beyond the published span there is no trajectory, and the station manoeuvres — so a position past the end of the file would be a guess, and none is offered.

    Chosen over two-line elements deliberately. A TLE requires SGP4 propagation and carries kilometre-level error by construction; this is the operator's own trajectory, and it comes with the ascending-node longitudes NASA computed from it — which is what makes the reference-frame transformation verifiable rather than merely plausible.

What is not connected, and why

General catalogues of orbital elements. Tracking an arbitrary satellite needs two-line element sets for it. The public catalogue is distributed by a small number of hosts, and at the time this was built the one AsteriaStar evaluated — CelesTrak— refused automated connections outright after a handful of requests. That is its operator's prerogative and their terms are theirs to set; what it means here is that an integration could not be established, let alone verified, so none is claimed.

Space-Track.The United States Space Force's catalogue requires an account and its terms govern redistribution. AsteriaStar holds no credentials for it, and building a public feature on credentials the platform does not have would be architecture pretending to be capability.

Scraping a tracking website.Not done, and not planned. Reading somebody else's rendered page to extract data they publish deliberately through other channels is neither reliable nor respectful, and it would put a layer of somebody else's arithmetic between this platform and the truth.

The consequence is a section that does one thing properly. The station is tracked from the operator's own trajectory file, the coordinate transformation is verified against the operator's own numbers, and the pass predictions run on the reader's device. Everything else in the satellite encyclopedia — its 30 catalogued satellites, their operators, orbits and constellations — remains reference material, which is what it has always honestly been.

Provenance

One satellite is tracked live on this platform, and it is the International Space Station — because NASA publishes its operational trajectory openly and documents it. General catalogues of orbital elements for other satellites are either behind credentials whose terms do not permit this use, or served by hosts that refuse automated access. AsteriaStar does not scrape satellite-tracking sites, so the rest of the sky is honestly absent rather than approximately present.

ISS operational ephemeris

Live
Status
Live
Kind
Model product
Provider
NASA ISS Trajectory Data
Organisation
NASA Johnson Space Center, Flight Operations Directorate (TOPO)
Fetched
2026-09-16 16:41 UTC
Generated by provider
2026-09-14 15:42 UTC
Valid until
2026-09-29 12:00 UTC
Provider cadence
3 d
Cached for
6 h
Treated as stale after
4 d
Licence
Public domain (US Government work), NASA/JSC.

Source file: https://nasa-public-data.s3.amazonaws.com/iss-coords/current/ISS_OEM/ISS.OEM_J2K_EPH.txt

ISS operational ephemeris (CCSDS OEM) from NASA ISS Trajectory Data, fetched from https://nasa-public-data.s3.amazonaws.com/iss-coords/current/ISS_OEM/ISS.OEM_J2K_EPH.txt. NASA regenerates this file every few days and it covers fifteen. Six hours is a small fraction of the interval between publications, and re-parsing five thousand state vectors on every page view would be pure waste.

A predicted trajectory, not a measurement: state vectors from NASA's operational determination and propagation, in the mean equator and equinox of J2000, at four-minute spacing. It covers fifteen days from its creation and NOTHING beyond that — the station manoeuvres, and no position is offered past the end of the file. Positions between tabulated epochs are interpolated by the method the CCSDS standard specifies.

File generated by NASA/JSC/FOD/TOPO at 2026-09-14 15:42 UTC, covering 2026-09-14 12:00 UTC to 2026-09-29 12:00 UTC in 4,739 state vectors.

Sources & references

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.

  • CelesTrakCelesTrak (Dr. T. S. Kelso)

    Two-line orbital elements (TLEs) for satellites including the ISS, used with a propagator to predict passes.