Why Bother To Track Satellites?

#1

This is a question that MANY people have asked me. The US government (and others) tracks satelliltes and hands out orbits for FREE!
But do they hand out all orbits? Or just some?
Just some! So what, who cares if they hide a few, they know where they are and they are doing the right thing!

Are they???
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3397/1

The Air Force conceals some satellite orbits and then goes off and forgets about them. When they reenter, the normal alerts are not issued.

This is an example of how an archive of orbits can be used to analyze what is going on and alert people to possible danger.

Charles

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#2

I was under the impression that once the satellite is launched, all future paths of that are determined and available to compute when a specific question is asked (like what is the probability of collision when SpaceX constellation is launched?) Even if the launcher/owner of the satellite is not exposing the complete orbit info, I was thinking they have enough controls in place to prevent a bad scenario.
But it sounds like this “space” is very distributed and no central way to control it and it makes sense by the very nature of the “space” (pun intended). Hence the need the tracking I suppose. Is one of the aim to immediately identify anomalies (between our observation and cited trajectory) ?

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