NOAA 18
Operator: United States
Live Position
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About This Satellite
NOAA-18, launched in May 2005, is a polar weather satellite in the POES series. Its microwave sounders and imagers provide global temperature and humidity profiles that feed numerical weather prediction, and its APT transmitter broadcasts live images to ground stations.
Source: Wikipedia — NOAA-18 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
NOAA 18 is a cataloged satellite tracked under NORAD ID 28654 with international designator 05018A. According to the GCAT master catalog, it was built by LMSS, on the ATN platform, with a launch mass of about 1420 kg, with a shape described as Box + Pan. It is associated with US. According to the TLE snapshot used when this page was generated (2026-08-18), its LEO orbit had an apogee of about 864 km and a perigee near 844 km, with an inclination of 98.81° and a period of roughly 101.9 minutes; at apogee its speed was about 7.42 km/s. It was launched on 2005-05-20. Positions on this page are near-real-time SGP4 predictions propagated from the latest two-line element (TLE) data.
In the TLE snapshot used to generate this page, NOAA 18's apogee was 864 km, where its speed was about 7.42 km/s, completing about 14.1 orbits of Earth per day. Track it live on the map above or in the JOT orbital map.