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.
Note
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. TABASCAL, the original consumer, documents its policy in its own orbit records guide.
Install
pip install satchecker-client
Pure Python, depending only on pandas and numpy; Python 3.10–3.14.