Orekit support of SGP4-XP TLEs?

Orekit usage
1

Hi, I was looking into using the new format of TLEs that use SGP4-XP with Orekit. I found this : aholinch/orekit-sgp4-xp: Integrate USSF binaries for SGP4 and SGP4-XP propagators into Orekit.

But I was wondering if this is already supported by Orekit natively, given how long it has been since then. Looking into the code of Orekit there are mentions of SGP4-XP but only in the CCSDS module, maybe for parsing things. Do I have to use the binaries provided from space-track and the github project to use XP TLEs? Or is is sufficient to just create a TLE propagator with Orekit 13 and it will recognize the type and use the appropriate model?

2

Unfortunately, SGP4-XP is not supported in Orekit. The reason is that the underlying algorithms are not publicly available. There are only closed-sources binaries available.

3

Thanks Luc. I had that impression but wanted to be sure… I think I can get by simply using the provided binaries directly from python. And use the output with Orekit for frame conversions, technically I dont need anything else. Thanks for the fast response :slight_smile:

4

Hi,
If you want to use the orekit-sgp4-xp java classes (e.g. USSFJniTLEPropagator) in Orekit Python, one way to do it is to pass the JAR (probably you need to compile it yourself) to orekit jpype via the argument additional_classpaths of the method orekit_jpype.initVM as documented here

5

Thank you. I will consider this for the future. Right now, I am trying the SGP4 from Spacetrack, it is working.