# SGP4/SDP4 validation against the community reference
Kshana's orbit propagator is validated against the **canonical community
reference** for SGP4/SDP4: the verification vectors published with Vallado et
al., *"Revisiting Spacetrack Report #3"* (AIAA 2006-6753), distributed as
`SGP4-VER.TLE` (the test TLEs) and `tcppver.out` (the expected TEME state at each
time). This is the same reference the public C++/Python/MATLAB implementations
validate against, so agreement here is agreement with the de-facto standard.
## Result
| Reference states compared | **666** (all rows in `tcppver.out`, pinned in the test) |
| Worst position error | **≈ 4 mm** (< `2e-5` km tolerance) |
| Worst velocity error | **≈ 1.85e-9 km/s** (< `1e-6` km/s tolerance) |
| Cases covered | near-Earth SGP4, deep-space SDP4 (lunar-solar + 12 h/24 h resonance), and the deliberate error-code cases |
The deep-space and resonant cases matter specifically for this project: GNSS
satellites sit in ~12 h orbits that are deep-space and resonant, which a
two-body + J2-secular model cannot reproduce — SGP4/SDP4 can.
## Method
- The implementation (`src/sgp4.rs`) is a dependency-free Rust port of the
public-domain Vallado algorithm; epoch handling is days-since-1950, the
`improved` (not `afspc`) mode is used, and WGS-72 gravity constants are applied
as the reference specifies.
- The test (`tests/sgp4_verification.rs`) parses the vendored `SGP4-VER.TLE` and
`tcppver.out` fixtures (`tests/fixtures/sgp4/`), propagates each test satellite
to every reference time, and asserts the TEME position and velocity match within
the tolerances above. The compared-row count is pinned at exactly **666** so a
fixture or skip-behaviour regression cannot quietly reduce coverage.
## Reproduce it
```sh
cargo test --test sgp4_verification -- --nocapture
```
The test prints the number of rows compared and the worst-case position and
velocity errors. The fixtures are committed, so the check is fully offline and
deterministic.
## Status of "publishing" this result
The cross-validation itself is complete and in-tree. Submitting the result to
external venues (a community catalogue, a short note, a DOI-archived record) is a
maintainer action tracked separately on the roadmap; this document is the
in-repository record those submissions would point to.