---
id: "cospar_id"
kind: "datatype"
status: "draft"
is_pii: false
categories: ["science"]
langs: ["common"]
quality: 85
url: "http://registry.apicrafter.io/datatype/cospar_id"
---

# International Designator (COSPAR ID) of a space object (`cospar_id`)

> **Draft.** Draft records have not been reviewed yet and may be incomplete or wrong; do not treat them as authoritative for legal or compliance decisions.

International identifier of an artificial object in space, assigned by United States Space Command together with the satellite catalog number. It is the launch year, a hyphen, the three-digit number of the launch in that year and one to three letters for the piece of that launch. In TLE files the century and the hyphen are left out. The modern scheme was introduced in 1963 and replaced Greek-letter designations.

- Personal data (PII): no
- Categories: Scientific (science)
- Countries: global
- Languages: Common to most languages (common)
- Classification: identifier

## Detection

Regular expression (Python `re`):

```
^(?:19[5-9]\d|20\d{2})-\d{3}[A-Z]{1,3}$
```

## Examples

- `1990-037A` — Space Shuttle Discovery, mission STS-31
- `1990-037B` — Hubble Space Telescope
- `1970-060A` — Venera 7
- `1990-37A` (invalid example) — The launch number must have three digits

## Mappings

- wikidata: `P247`

## Sources

- wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Designator>
- wikidata: <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P247>

## Quality

Score 85/100. Missing: translation, detector coverage.

JSON: <http://registry.apicrafter.io/api/v1/datatypes/cospar_id.json> · Edit: <https://github.com/apicrafter/metacrafter-registry/edit/main/data/datatypes/any/science/cospar_id.yaml>