Wait a minute. I don't think it is Paul's fault. I looked at my raw 2-line set from last week and it had missing spaces. Every raw 2-line set upto last week was OK.
Each week as part of my process, I replace all AFSPC "+" marks with a blank space. As I did this last week, I must have typed some character other than "+" and the replacement failed. I did not notice this and the 2-line elements had messed up row lengths.
I went through my process this week very carefully and did not have last weeks problem. This week should be OK.
Paul Williamson wrote:
At 3:44 PM -0700 7/8/09, Bryan Green wrote:
Minor emergency: the "Bare NASA (2-line) format elements page" appears to be truncated:
http://www.amsat.org/amsat/ftp/keps/current/nasabare.txt
This in turn means that my beloved GoSatWatch software is no-worky!
Who fixes these things?
That's me, I wrote and maintain the scripts that create the files on the FTP site from the Keps bulletins published by Ray Hoad. Thanks for pointing out the problem.
The script that creates the nasabare.txt file simply scans the nasa.all file and copies out everything that's a valid 2-line element set. The nasa.all file, in turn, is created by saving everything between the SB line and the /EX line in the bulletin email message, just as a packet radio BBS would have done.
The error this week is actually in the bulletin text itself. Many of the element sets in the bulletin were mangled for some reason. You can see this easily by noting that the line lengths are not all the same, as they should be.
I have replaced both nasa.all and nasabare.txt with versions from last week's bulletins. When Ray publishes a new set (usually on Friday), they will be replaced as usual with the latest info.
73 -Paul [email protected]