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Every Satellite Tracked In Realtime Via Google Earth
Matt Amato writes "With the recent discussion of the ISS having to dodge some space junk, many people's attention has once again focused on the amount of stuff in orbit around our planet. What many people don't know is that USSTRATCOM tracks and publishes a list of over 13,000 objects that they currently monitor, including active/retired satellites and debris. This data is meaningless to most people, but thanks to Analytical Graphics, it has now been made accessible free of charge to anyone with a copy of Google Earth. By grabbing the KMZ, you can not only view all objects tracked in real-time, but you can also click on them to get more information on the specific satellite, including viewing its orbit trajectory. It's an excellent educational tool for the space-curious. Disclaimer: I not only work for Analytical Graphics, but I'm the one that wrote this tool as a demo."
Every military satellite launched, not just by the US but by *anyone* can be tracked. Even gpredict has keps for US military stuff. You can track it, you can often see it with the naked eye, and you certainly can receive signals from them. Decoding the signals is harder, but with fairly modest equipment you can certainly hear that they are there.
The subject sums it up, but I'm getting a little pissed at technology that is developed at NASA (World Wind) is just getting co-opted by Google (Google Earth) with no respect paid to the initial innovators.
J-Track 3D has been around for years doing this exact same function of plotting satellite trajectories including ground trace and additional information if you click on the satellite.
Just because you do it using Google doesn't mean that it's new, cool, innovative or news worthy.
http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3d.html
There is also J-Track which on Windows, with its "active desktop" feature, can be set as your background/wallpaper to always be tracking weather and satellites.
Most of those products are limited to the surface. Google Earth is one of the only ones that also has a space view and a Z axis. So, this particular KML would be of limited usefulness to most of them. For example even Google maps, I have no idea what it would do with this KML.