What is Opera

What is Opera

OPERA is a CNES tool allowing to estimate long and middle term Earth reentry dates (some months to one week in advance) thanks to TLE.

It allows also to compute the information on other parameters as S/M or maneuvers previously occured.

At last, OPERA is able to generate automatic PDF reports with a synthesis of maneuver activity of a given object.

OPERA is usable via three modes:

• GUI: its utilization is made user-friendly thanks to a graphical user interface (developed using [GENIUS] and [GENOPUS]),
• Batch,
• Library via its Java interface.

Its initialization is made by:

• A list of initial orbital parameters thanks to TLE,
• Solar activity files,
• Several other specific parameters as the reentry altitude or how to filter TLE inputs.

For flight dynamics aspects, OPERA is fully based on the [PATRIUS] library and specially about the orbit extrapolation, the propagation is done thanks to the [STELA] propagator that allows to get interesting CPU time by comparison to a full numerical propagator while keeping sufficient precision relative to the reentry date.