U.S. Withholding Satellite Data

[Eugen Leitl]

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/22/0539254
Posted by: timothy, on 2005-02-22 07:33:00

   from the derives-from-a-mandate-from-the-masses dept.
   plover writes "Because of Congressional legislation passed quietly in
   2003, the Air Force Space Command will no longer [1]distribute space
   surveillance data via NASA. There was supposed a three year
   transitional period where the data was to be made available via a NASA
   web site, but earlier this month their transitional server went down
   hard, and NASA has decided to not rebuild it. (It was scheduled to be
   shut down on 31 March 2005 anyway.) The only way to obtain satellite
   data now is by signing up with the official [2]Space-Track website.
   Part of the agreement to obtaining data from their site is that you
   agree to not redistribute their data. Of course, [3]amateurs are still
   free to redistribute [4]their observations, [5]including those of
   classified satellites."


References

   1. http://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/notice.asp
   2. http://www.space-track.org/
   3. http://www.satobs.org/satintro.html
   4. http://www.amsat.org/amsat/sats/n7hpr/satsum.html
   5. http://home.t-online.de/home/R.Kracht/top50.htm

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]