Tracking Santa not a joy ride

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Dec 24, 2005 | by JIM BAINBRIDGE THE GAZETTE

Even if you don't believe that Santa is real, believe this: the NORAD Tracks Santa program is quite real.

Prepared by the Colorado Springs office of Analytical Graphics Inc., the software produces real physical and numerical simulations of the flight of aircraft and satellites. The stars in the sky are not just animated representations, but the array of stars visible in the sky at whatever location Santa is shown.

And the program is tweaked from year to year so that changes in a city's skyline are accounted for in the database.

This is more flight simulator than cartoon rendering.

"Aircraft that intercept Santa," said Dave Finkleman, senior scientist at AGI's Center for Space Standards and Innovation on the city's north side, "are numerical simulations of real airplanes, and the flight paths are real, physically realizable flight plans."

Santa's sleigh is substituted for an airplane image and follows one of these "realizable flight plans."

Articulations built into the program to account for, say, landing gear on an airplane, are modified here to create reindeer and Santa's arm movements.

AGI, based in Exton, Pa., provides software to more than 30,000 national-security and space professionals for analyses of land, sea, air and space efforts.

NORAD has been calling upon AGI's expertise since 1997, using pretty much the same software that NORAD uses worldwide to operate satellites and plan its missions.

Online traffic to the site quickly overwhelmed AGI's capacity, and AOL is now the Web host, capable of handling the 912 million hits from 181 countries the site got last December.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0126 or jim.bainbridge@gazette.com