Orbit-age trust and self-serve ephemeris reporting
Know when to trust an orbit
Every VALAR product that runs on a spacecraft's orbit (ground-station passes, ground-track and Keplerian plots, area-of-interest overflight, orbital events, attitude, and maneuver planning) now shares one view of how fresh that orbit is. Each spacecraft carries a single orbit-age status (nominal, degraded, or stale), computed the same way everywhere against a staleness threshold you set once in Settings. When an orbit ages past it, products no longer refuse to run: they warn you and let you proceed consciously, or explain plainly why they cannot. When no fresh precise orbit is available, VALAR falls back to the latest public-catalog orbit and says so. A persistent orbit-data-age footer, a cheatsheet status badge, and proactive status-change alerts keep the fleet's trustworthiness visible.
Self-serve ephemeris push
Operators with standing orbit-reporting obligations to the Space-Track and EU-SST catalogs can now meet them without leaving VALAR. Set up an ephemeris push task once (choose the spacecraft, the destination catalog, and the cadence) and VALAR builds the orbit ephemeris and delivers it on schedule. No more exporting a file by hand and logging into an external portal every reporting cycle. Each task keeps a delivery history, so you can confirm exactly what was sent and when.
Improvements
- Public-catalog orbit fallback: when a spacecraft's own precise orbit ages out, VALAR now automatically falls back to its latest public-catalog TLE (from Space-Track or CelesTrak) so passes, plots, overflight, and the rest keep working, clearly flagged as running on a fallback orbit instead of going dark.
- Archived spacecraft stay out of the way: archiving a spacecraft now takes full effect across the workspace. Archived craft drop out of spacecraft pickers and are excluded from orbit determination, overflight, conjunction screening, and alerts, and the spacecraft list defaults to active-only with an Archived badge on the rest.
- Permanently delete a spacecraft: a new danger-zone flow on the spacecraft detail page lets you permanently remove a spacecraft and all of its data. Before anything is deleted, VALAR shows exactly what will be removed and asks you to type the spacecraft's id to confirm.
- Faster with large fleets: the Ground Track and Keplerian Elements pages load noticeably faster when many spacecraft are selected.
Fixes
- Keplerian Elements: opening the Keplerian Elements page no longer gets stuck in a reload loop; the page loads reliably again.
- Maneuver export: exporting a maneuver plan that contains no maneuvers now produces a valid file instead of an error.
