When it’s connected to the internet, your Geochron Digital polls our servers as much as four times per minute to pull data down like Live Layers, system operations, and Satellite position.
At the same time, our servers are collecting that data from other service providers, since we don’t own any weather satellites, or have giant radars in New Mexico.
Although our servers format new data from these providers very quickly, we have to receive it from our service providers.
Celestrak is our primary service provider for satellite tracking, including launches. They update their data anywhere from a few minutes after an event, to eight hours. It is a free data source, and the Geochron’s data feed to you is being provided as no charge as well.
Most satellites follow an extremely predictable orbit so our telemetry data is updated at long intervals, but ground launches and re-entries need faster telemetry updates to be accurate. Geochron will provide these as soon as we get them, but we are dependent upon our service providers.
There may be faster data sources out there, but they cost money. If there is enough demand, Geochron may poll these for-profit sources and pass the cost on to our users as a “premium” service.
