describe here -- copy over appropriate stuff from the original port
This really needs some info
Simplified General Perturbations (SGP) models
This code began as a port of the MATLAB SGP4 code included with Nicolas Miura's Thesis CD. The CD contains supplementary files to Miura's Thesis, Comparison And Design Of Simplified General Perturbation Models (Sgp4) And Code For Nasa Johnson Space Center, Orbital Debris Program Office. The overview page at calpoly is here. You can read more about the history of the code and the giants shoulder on which we stand in Miura's excellent paper linked above.
We originally ported the SGP4 code to Javascript in order to replace a legacy Java satellite tracking applet with a browser based WebGL implementation. Chris Shenton did the initial transliteration from MATLAB to Javascript for iSat and I extracted that to modulerize the code and tests. sgp4 is uses Asyncronous Module Definition (AMD) and Jasmine to accomplish said modularization.
Javascript isn't my first language so there are likely some better ways to accomplish what I have done. Constructive suggestions are welcome. However, pull requests with tests and documentation are more likely to get action than suggestions:)
TODO. Example of loading the lib with requirejs
TODO: Installing and using nvm, r.js, docco, grunt etc...
TODO: describe how to write jasmine tests with requirejs