AI Builders Challenge with IBM Bob · August theme, Advance Space Exploration with AI

Which satellite passes are worth a reviewer’s time.

SatNOGS is a network of volunteer ground stations that record satellites passing overhead and publish every recording as a waterfall image. It produces far more than anyone can look at. TraceTriage reads the image and the orbital physics together, works out which unreviewed observations would teach a reviewer the most, and puts 407 of them in order, with the top 50 as the budget a volunteer actually has. It writes nothing back to the network. A human still decides.

Ground-station networks are how university and cubesat missions are actually operated, and an unreviewed pass is telemetry nobody read. The decision this serves is the one every mission-operations queue has: of everything that came down, what does a person open first.

One pass, propagated from a 550 km circular orbit at 97.6 degrees over a station at 52.2 degrees north. The track is elevation above the horizon; the curve beneath it is the Doppler shift that pass's range rate implies at 437 MHz. Drawn for this figure and not measured: every number this console publishes comes from a receipt.

46 seconds, narrated and captioned. Every figure it speaks is read from the same constants the animation draws, and scripts/build_explainers.py --check fails if the clip, its captions and this page ever disagree. The evidence behind each page is in FOR_JUDGES.md, one section per judged criterion.