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Will the actual coordinates of JWST be made available for download (on an ongoing basis)?

It would be interesting to have these, to better understand and appreciate station keeping maneuvers.

Bruce Simonson
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    You can get the coordinates (in a variety of forms) from JPL Horizons. See https://space.stackexchange.com/a/57832/38535 – PM 2Ring Feb 19 '22 at 11:05
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    Here's some RA & Dec data, plus range & range rate, for JWST relative to the centre of the Earth. You can easily get alt-az data if you supply the details of the observation centre. JWST – PM 2Ring Feb 19 '22 at 11:28
  • I don't know if it is feasible to discern maneuvers from HORIZONS state vector data – BrendanLuke15 Feb 19 '22 at 12:40
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    @BrendanLuke15 ya those are not meant to have that extreme level of fidelity, and course with a new maneuver every two weeks they won't be updating the ephemeris after each one. Back in 2016 tried to look for SOHO's station-keeping maneuvers in Horizons and found splicing errors instead! Is this what station keeping maneuvers look like, or just glitches in data? (SOHO via Horizons) However once publicly available data starts coming from JWST it might contain more detailed position information the way DSCOVR's data does. – uhoh Feb 19 '22 at 13:37
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    Fair point, @BrendanLuke15. Horizons does have trajectory info based on actual burns for the 1st month, but as uhoh says, they probably won't be updating that every 2 weeks. OTOH, the body data file was updated a few days ago, so I guess there's a chance that they'll keep the ephemeris relatively up to date. – PM 2Ring Feb 19 '22 at 13:46
  • Any thoughts or suggestions on how to best ask NASA to make these detailed coordinate and velocity data available for download? – Bruce Simonson Feb 19 '22 at 19:50

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