juliensimon/starlink-tle-latest

Latest Starlink & GPS TLEs

Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Latest Two-Line Element (TLE) orbital data for the Starlink (10,100 satellites) and GPS (32 satellites) constellations, sourced daily from CelesTrak.

Dataset description

Two-Line Element sets (TLEs) are the standard format for representing satellite orbital elements, developed by NORAD in the 1960s and still used universally today. Each TLE encodes six Keplerian orbital elements plus drag terms in a compact two-line ASCII format designed for use with the SGP4/SDP4 analytical propagation model. When fed into an SGP4 propagator, a TLE can predict a satellite's position and velocity for several days forward or backward from its epoch, with accuracy typically within a few kilometers for well-tracked objects.

This dataset provides daily-fresh TLEs for two critical constellations. The Starlink TLEs enable tracking of the largest object population in LEO -- essential for conjunction screening, RF interference analysis, and constellation operations research. The GPS TLEs cover the NAVSTAR constellation in MEO, which serves as the backbone of the Global Positioning System used by billions of devices worldwide. GPS orbital elements are particularly important for precision timing applications, geodetic surveys, and as reference orbits for validating propagation models.

The raw .tle files are provided alongside Parquet for maximum compatibility: orbit propagation libraries like python-sgp4, orekit, and STK consume the standard three-line TLE format directly. The Parquet format is better suited for bulk analysis, filtering, and integration with data science workflows. Because TLE accuracy degrades rapidly with time (especially for LEO objects experiencing variable atmospheric drag), daily updates are essential for any operational application.

Raw TLE files

For applications that consume standard 3-line TLE format (e.g., SGP4 propagators):

• data/starlink.tle — raw TLE text
• data/gps.tle — raw TLE text

Schema (Parquet)

Column	Type	Description
name	string	Satellite name (e.g., "STARLINK-1234", "NAVSTAR 78")
line1	string	TLE line 1
line2	string	TLE line 2

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# Starlink TLEs
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/starlink-tle-latest", "starlink", split="train")

# GPS TLEs
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/starlink-tle-latest", "gps", split="train")

# Use with sgp4 library
from sgp4.api import Satrec
sat = Satrec.twoline2rv(ds[0]["line1"], ds[0]["line2"])

Data source

CelesTrak (Dr. T.S. Kelso), mirroring NORAD/18th Space Defense Squadron data.

Update schedule

Daily at 05:00 UTC via GitHub Actions.

Related datasets

• space-track-tle-history — 238M historical TLEs (1959–present)
• starlink-fleet-data — Daily Starlink constellation health snapshots
• space-track-satcat — Full NORAD satellite catalog

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{starlink_tle_latest,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Latest Starlink & GPS TLEs},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/starlink-tle-latest},
  note = {Based on NORAD data via CelesTrak (Dr. T.S. Kelso)}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0