python program to track orion spacecraft and the moon with information from https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/
It uses astroquery to make queries to nasa horizons system.
It uses matplotlib to draw a 3D plot with the trajectory of orion and the moon. You get something like this (this is up to November 29):
Moon is the gray trajectory, blue is for Orion, and the small blue sphere represents the earth (not in real scale). This is at 17:00 of Monday 5 of December:
And this at 23:00 of Friday 9 of December, coming home ! :
And almost landing at Earth (Sunday 11 of December):
Must specify starting and ending dates:
python3 ./trackorionandmoon.py 2022-11-16 09:03:00 2022-11-28 0:0:0According to the information from Horizons, the first available date for orion is 2022-NOV-16 09:03:00.0000 TDB. Times assumed to be in Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB) time.