International Designator
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alphanumerical designation used to identify spacecraft in or beyond Earth orbit launched since 1962
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- identifier
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- issued by
- Committee on Space Research
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Encyclopedic overview
The International Designator is an international identifier assigned to artificial objects in space. It consists of the launch year, a three-digit incrementing launch number of that year and up to a three-letter code representing the sequential identifier of a piece in a launch. In TLE format the first two digits of the year and the dash are dropped. For example, 1990-037A is the Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-31, which carried the Hubble Space Telescope (1990-037B) into space. This launch was the 37th known successful launch worldwide in 1990.
Historical process
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “International Designator” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.