ISS Ground Track

Chapter 2 builds gravitational orbits from force accumulation. Rather than simulate one, this page shows a real orbit: the live ground track of the International Space Station.

It fetches the station’s latitude and longitude from the wheretheiss.at API, projects them onto an equirectangular map, and re-polls every few seconds while the page is open. The trail is the path of an actual body held in orbit by exactly the force chapter 2 is about, so it is a reality check on the from-scratch version: if your simulated satellite does not trace a sine-like ground track like this one, your integrator is wrong.

Data source: wheretheiss.at API
Endpoint: https://api.wheretheiss.at/v1/satellites/25544
Access: Public, no key. Loaded from an hourly server-side refresh when possible, with a bundled snapshot fallback, and a live browser fetch only when the API allows CORS. Data window: Jul 18, 2026 (pulled Jul 18, 2026 UTC)

The station really does move about this fast relative to the ground, roughly one full orbit every 92 minutes.