A standard graphics card can now track the entire Starlink satellite network in less than four milliseconds.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
jaxsgp4: GPU-accelerated mega-constellation propagation with batch parallelism
arXiv · 2603.27830
The Takeaway
Predicting collisions for 'mega-constellations' of tens of thousands of satellites is usually a massive computational challenge. A new GPU-based algorithm achieved a 1,500x speedup, allowing a single machine to map the future paths of every satellite in the sky nearly instantly.
From the abstract
As the population of anthropogenic space objects transitions from sparse clusters to mega-constellations exceeding 100,000 satellites, traditional orbital propagation techniques face a critical bottleneck. Standard CPU-bound implementations of the Simplified General Perturbations 4 (SGP4) algorithm are less well suited to handle the requisite scale of collision avoidance and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) tasks. This paper introduces \texttt{jaxsgp4}, an open-source high-performance reimpleme