Brian Wilkins wrote: 
> I don’t know how these TLEs are produced that led to this problem where we could help.

Careful Brian, you are getting dangerously close to volunteering 🙂

The production of the AMSAT Keplerian bulletin is a semi-automated process that uses an ancient Windows program - source code and author no longer available.    Ray Hoad cuts and pastes the output of this program into an e-mail and then posts it to the Keps mailing list.    The AMSAT Web server checks the mailman archive once an hour - if it sees a new bulletin, it fires the update script to make nasa.all, nasabare.txt and amsat.pdb current.

The time is right to redo this system because.  

  1. Matt KM4EXS is putting finishing touches on GitLab access to some other parts of our server, so we have a place for source
  2. All TLEs presently come from Space-Track - we no longer have "specials" from Cal Poly or Johnson Spaceflight Center
  3. I can't prove it, but I think the Microsoft Outlook Web Application is doing weird things with line feeds sometimes.
  4. I have to fuss with the scripts as it is to strip out the extra line feeds and carriage returns, why not do a little more work
The essence of what needs to be done is to maintain a curated list of object numbers,  pull the current TLEs from Space-Track.org replace the Space Force name with the AMSAT name (e.g "AO-7" instead of "OSCAR 7") and generate the bulletin text.

Should be pretty straightforward.    I'm thinking of a Python 3 script using the https://pypi.org/project/spacetrack/ module.   Perhaps the trickiest part of the effort is determining the best way to give Ray a nice secure web page he can log into for maintenance of the list of object number/AMSAT name pairs.

-Joe KM1P
AMSAT IT