Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Numerous spacecraft have been reported to experience failures or anomalies due to various sources such as solar and geomagnetic storms. One of the important keys to investigate anomalies on spacecraft is satellite local time (SLT) utilized to track satellite position in space. Since not every local time of anomaly was registered and recorded well especially for low Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft, it is necessary to find a method to determine SLT. A Simplified General Perturbations-4 (SGP4) method has been applied to overcome the absence of SLT information in the satellite anomaly database. A series of DMSP satellites are employed for the case study. In addition, the AACGM model is also taken into account for mean local times (MLTs) calculation. The discrepancy of MLTs is found between the observation, calculation and AACGM model and supposedly comes from the TLE data, which seemingly gives rise to incorrect orbital parameters. The deviation of MLTs leads to different morphology of MLT distribution in which the observed MLTs scatter from dusk to midnight sector, whereas the others spread within the dusk and noon sectors of MLT.</jats:p>