› Forums › General Discussion › Identification of artificial satellites / junk? › Bill Gray’s online SatID
Hi Tim,
If you can get two or more positions for a suspected artsat you can use the online SatID page to try and make an identification:
https://www.projectpluto.com/sat_id2.htm
More than one position is required to get a rate and direction of of motion for matching to known objects. SatID requires positions in MPC format which isn’t too difficult to manually format. Your time/RA/Dec translates to this (using my observatory code J95 which is close enough to your site):
ARTSAT C2019 07 26.00547519 44 27.00 -06 53 54.0 J95
Try as a test these two observations from ATLAS which should identify as art sat 1999-040D:
A10f7FB* C2019 07 27.39210618 38 00.78 -19 14 18.6 14.59oVNEOCPT08
A10f7FB C2019 07 27.39767518 38 37.34 -19 25 31.0 15.25oVNEOCPT08
The output from SatID was:
2 observations found 2 observations left after dropping extras A10f7FB* C2019 07 27.39210618 38 00.78 -19 14 18.6 14.59oVNEOCPT08 25869U = 1999-040D e=0.82; P=1481.0 min; i=36.3: IUS R/B(2) motion 1.76″/sec at PA 142.3; dist= 73013.8 km; offset= 0.00 deg 0.1 seconds elapsed
(Just in case the formatting of the MPC lines gets messed up, I’ve attached those examples in a word doc)
Peter