🛰️ CelesTrak Satellites Orbital Catalog Scraper

🚀 Export the live orbital catalog in seconds. Pull fresh element sets for tens of thousands of tracked Earth-orbiting objects across 47 satellite groups (Starlink, ISS, GPS, Galileo, OneWeb, Iridium, NOAA, debris fields, and more). No login, no API key, no manual parsing.

The CelesTrak Satellites Orbital Catalog Scraper pulls the official CelesTrak orbital element catalog and returns 23 fields per object, including NORAD catalog ID, international designator, epoch, inclination, eccentricity, mean motion, B* drag term, plus computed orbital period, semi-major axis, and approximate altitude. The underlying catalog is curated from the U.S. Space Force public space situational awareness feed and has been the reference orbital dataset for satellite operators, hobbyists, and academic researchers since 1985.

The catalog covers 47 curated satellite groups, including every active object, the major communications constellations (Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, Iridium NEXT, Globalstar, Orbcomm), all four GNSS systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou), space stations, weather and Earth-resource satellites, CubeSats, debris fields (Cosmos 2251, Iridium 33, Fengyun-1C), and the most-recent 30 days of launches. This Actor exports the lot as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML. All filters run server-side, so you skip the orbital math too.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Aerospace engineers, satellite operators, ground-station builders, GIS teams, OSINT analysts, astronomy hobbyists, educators	Pass prediction, conjunction screening, ground-track plotting, constellation analytics, telescope scheduling, ham-radio satellite tracking

📋 What the CelesTrak Satellites Scraper does

Five filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🛰️ Group export. Pick any of 47 curated groups (active, Starlink, GPS, ISS, debris, weather, etc.).
• 🔍 Name search. Substring match across object name (e.g. STARLINK, ISS, NOAA).
• 🆔 Single-object lookup. Pull one object by NORAD catalog ID or COSPAR international designator.
• 📐 Inclination filter. Restrict to a specific orbital plane band (e.g. polar, sun-synchronous, equatorial).
• ⚡ Computed orbital metrics. Period in minutes, semi-major axis in km, and approximate altitude above Earth, derived per record.

Each record includes the full mean motion, eccentricity, RAAN, argument of pericenter, mean anomaly, drag term, ephemeris type, and revolution count needed to feed any SGP4 propagator.

💡 Why it matters: orbital element sets refresh constantly as ground stations track each pass. Building your own pipeline means handling the catalog format, normalizing fields, and re-pulling on a cadence. This Actor delivers a clean per-object record on every run, so your propagator stays fed.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: altitudeNote, approxAltitudeKm, argOfPericenterDeg, bstarPerEarthRadii, classification, classificationLabel, eccentricity, elementSetNo, ephemerisType, epoch, inclinationDeg, launchYear, meanAnomalyDeg, meanMotion, meanMotionDDot, meanMotionDot, noradCatId, objectId, objectName, orbitalPeriodMinutes, raOfAscNodeDeg, revAtEpoch, scrapedAt, semiMajorAxisKm. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the CelesTrak Satellites Orbital Catalog Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a group (or look up a single object by NORAD ID), narrow with name search or inclination filters, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by CelesTrak, Dr. T.S. Kelso, the U.S. Space Force, or any of its data contributors. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open orbital data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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