satchecker-client

A small Python client for the IAU CPS SatChecker service, which publishes nearest-epoch satellite orbital records — TLEs up to the 2026-07-12 archive handover, OMM element sets after it. No account or credentials are needed.

Unofficial. This is a third-party client written for the TABASCAL and tab-sim radio-astronomy packages. It is not published, endorsed, or maintained by the IAU CPS SatHub team, who develop the SatChecker service itself. The distribution name deliberately avoids satchecker so that name stays available to them.

What it does

• Transport — both nearest-record endpoints, with normalised column sets and a typed error hierarchy that separates a per-satellite miss from a service outage or a rate limit.
• Parsing — TLE line parsing including Alpha-5 catalogue numbers and checksums, plus the element range and finiteness checks both record kinds share.
• Kind dispatch — one place that knows how TLE and OMM records differ, so callers spanning the archive handover do not thread a format flag through their own code.
• Caching — a validated, atomically-written per-NORAD JSON store.
• Batching — bounded-concurrency fetches that stop on the first sign the service itself is the problem rather than working through the rest of a list.

What it does not do

It takes no view on which record your observation should use. Source precedence, how stale a record may be before it is refused, and whether missing coverage is fatal are application policy and stay with the caller.

Install

pip install satchecker-client

Use

import satchecker_client as sc

# Identify your application to the service operators. Optional, but the service
# is a courtesy to the community and shared traffic is easier to reason about
# when it is attributable.
sc.set_client_identifier("my-app/1.0")

epoch_jd = 2460800.5
norad_ids = [25544, 48274]

# nearest_endpoints_for picks TLE, OMM, or both, based on where the epoch falls
# relative to the archive handover.
for label, fetch in sc.nearest_endpoints_for(epoch_jd):
    result = sc.fetch_nearest_batch(norad_ids, epoch_jd, fetch_nearest=fetch, endpoint=label)
    if result.outage is not None:
        raise result.outage          # the service, not this satellite
    for norad_id, err in result.errors.items():
        print(f"{norad_id}: {err}")  # this satellite, keep going
    print(result.records)

Records are pandas rows; ask record_kind, record_epoch_jd and record_elements about one rather than testing for columns yourself.

Caching a fetch for reuse across nearby epochs:

cache = sc.TextOrbitCache("~/.cache/my-app/orbits")
sc.store_or_warn(cache, norad_id, result.records)
known = cache.get(norad_id)

Development

pip install -e ".[test]"
pytest

The tests block outbound network access via an autouse fixture, so the suite runs offline and never touches the live service.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE. Extracted from TABASCAL, which is GPL-3.0; this client is relicensed by its copyright holder so that a thin API client is not the thing that constrains what it can be built into.