Angelina Tsuboi's SatIntel is the Command-Line Tool You Need for Working With Satellites

Programmer and pilot Angelina Tsuboi has released a tool designed to help you monitor orbiting satellites, offering everything from telemetry display to orbital predictions: SatIntel.

"SatIntel is an OSINT [Open-Source Intelligence] tool for satellite reconnaissance made with Golang," Tsuboi explains of the project. "The tool can extract satellite telemetry, receive orbital predictions (visual and radio), and parse TLEs [Two-Line Elements]."

The latter feature refers to the two-line element set format used to encode a list of orbital elements for any given Earth-orbiting object — such as a man-made satellite — for a given epoch. Using this, it's possible to predict with reasonable accuracy the position of said satellite at any point in the past or future. In the case of Tsuboi's tool, those predictions include both visual and radio — when you can see the satellite, and when you're able to receive its signals.

There's no need for any radio hardware to use SatIntel, though. Tsuboi's tool instead links to two online services — Space Track and N2YO — and queries their application programming interfaces (APIs) to get the data it needs. The developer has ideas for further features, too, including displaying an ASCII-art map of satellite position and improving predictions by incorporating the SGP4 algorithm.

Tsuboi's software is now available on GitHub, under an unspecified open source license.