u1i/iss-position-snapshots

ISS Position Snapshots (2021 - 2026)

This dataset contains over 1.45 million raw telemetry snapshots of the International Space Station's (ISS) orbital position, collected over a span of roughly 5 years (September 2021 through April 2026).

It is particularly useful for tasks involving orbital mechanics modeling, anomaly detection (e.g., identifying orbital boosts, decay spikes, or docking maneuvers), and time-series forecasting.

Dataset Structure

Because of the massive number of individual snapshot files (1.45M+), the dataset is distributed as monthly .zip archives (e.g., ISS_data_2021-09.zip).

Inside each archive, the data is organized into subdirectories by day, and each individual reading is stored as a .txt file named using its UNIX timestamp:

ISS_data_2021-09.zip
└── 2021-09-28/
    ├── 1632824928.txt
    ├── 1632825194.txt
    └── ...

Data Format

Each .txt file contains a single JSON payload representing the ISS position at that exact second.

Example Payload (1632824928.txt):

{
  "timestamp": 1632824929, 
  "iss_position": {
    "longitude": "-94.3214", 
    "latitude": "-46.9903"
  }, 
  "message": "success"
}

Known Data Gaps & Caveats

This is a real-world, continuously collected dataset, and as such, it is not perfectly contiguous.

There are several periods of missing data (blackouts) spread throughout the 5-year timeline. These gaps were primarily caused by disk space limitations and temporary outages on the local recording hardware tracking the ISS API.

If you are using this dataset for continuous time-series modeling or anomaly detection, you will need to account for these missing time blocks (e.g., via interpolation or splitting into contiguous chunks).