Orbital data tooling · NEOGY LLC

On 11 July 2026 the US Space Force catalog assigned number 100000 (to the Portuguese CubeSat SARAMAGO) after exhausting the five-digit range, which ends at 69999 (CelesTrak); provider data now carries six-digit, nine-digit and lettered (Alpha-5) catalog numbers, and libraries reading them may not expect these forms.

gpconf is a free test kit that tells you whether your satellite software handles catalog numbers above 99,999 — built from real CelesTrak data, with every expected answer traced to its source. It is the GP/OMM conformance corpus: eighteen cases with no invented element sets, a runner that installs with pip install gpconf, presets that test a library with no adapter written, and a GitHub Action for CI.

Each run by hand at the version named, six on 2026-09-24 against the seventeen cases of the time and libsgp4 and astroz on 2026-09-27 against v0.4.0's eighteen, and every finding reproduced on the library's own code before it was reported. These are results against a specific version on a specific date, not verdicts on the projects. All eight failed on Alpha-5 TLEs when first run, on 2026-09-24, but CelesTrak emits no Alpha-5 at all, so users who take their TLEs from CelesTrak don't meet those failures today.

PyEphem 4.2.1 — #296
Five-digit sets exact, epoch within a microsecond.
Alpha-5 fields read as catalog number 0, silently.

satellite.js 7.1.0 — #185, PR #186, PR #187
All 604 five-digit TLE sets exact, nine-digit OMM ids accepted.
OMM JSON epochs truncated to ms (#186 merged); TLE ids as strings (#187 open).

Gpredict 2.6 — #426
Five-digit ids right, every element but one exact.
Alpha-5 fields become 0; the mean motion loses its last digit on every record.

gods-eye-view main ce671ce — #751, PR #767
Five-digit ids right, 1998 epoch pivots.
Alpha-5 satellites collapse onto one entry keyed NaN; the rest dropped (#767 open).

SatDump 1.2.2 and master — #1221
Five-digit sets exact, six-digit CSV ids on master.
Alpha-5 sets dropped silently; SupGP CSV rejected whole on master.

libsgp4 v3.0 — #45, #44
Five-digit sets exact but for an 8 µs epoch rounding, CSV takes six-digit ids.
Alpha-5 decoded since v3.0; SupGP CSV refused whole, #45's rounding unresolved.

tle.js 5.0.3 — #62
Five-digit sets exact, checksums count letters as 0.
Alpha-5 fields give NaN with no error; two-digit years pivot at 50.

astroz v0.14.0 — #97, #98, #102
Carried elements exact, nine-digit JSON ids as integers.
Alpha-5 (#97) and epoch (#98) fixed in v0.13.0, seconds (#102) in v0.14.0; now MIT.

• Five fixes merged upstream: three pull requests from this account, python-sgp4 PR #172 (the empty OBJECT_ID in OMM XML) and satellite.js PR #186 (OMM JSON epochs kept to the microsecond) and PR #187 (an Alpha-5 decoder), none yet in a release; astroz's own PR #99, for #97 and #98, released in v0.13.0; and libsgp4's own #46, released in v3.0, two days after the corpus's results on its PR #42.
• Twelve reports filed with ten projects, the eight above plus python-sgp4 and strf, astroz accounting for three, each stating what was run and how to reproduce it.
• gpconf v0.6.1 released, on PyPI and archived on Zenodo: concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22867654, version DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23144821.

pip install gpconf
gpconf fetch                                                  # once; fetches the fixtures under CelesTrak's usage policy
gpconf run --preset reference                                 # the control
gpconf presets                                                # libraries testable with no adapter written
gpconf run --adapter mypkg.gpconf_adapter:Parser --json report.json   # your parser

NEOGY LLC, orbital data tooling. Results and a live tracker at gpconf.neogy.dev · gpconf · neogy.dev