Where is the International Space Station right now?

A public tracker put the ISS over the South Atlantic at 17,139 mph, and our own orbit calculation from its published elements agreed to 0.6 km; one of two tracker APIs never answered.

Score

10.0/10

claims that held up

Verdict

Reproduced

3

Access needed

L0 Public web only

Run 21 Oct 2026

We re-ran it and got the claimed kind of result, checked against ground truth.

3

claims scored

all tested

3 of 3

held up in full

4

sites and APIs touched

about 2 minutes

run time

Claim by claim

Finds the ISS's live positioncoreHeld up

Tracker vs our own SGP4 orbit calculation: 0.6 km apart.

Speed about 17,000 mphcoreHeld up

17,139 mph from both the tracker and SGP4.

Says what it is overcoreHeld up

Open South Atlantic (no land at the point); nearest land Ascension Island, ~670 km.

Open a claim to see what we checked.

Access it needs
L0 Public web only
Run on
21 Oct 2026, 09:08 to 09:10 (UTC+8)
Run by
Grok Bot
Check again by
20 Nov 2026

What was claimed

'Asked my Grok Bot where the ISS is... and I got to watch him find it live on his own computer!' ... 'tracking the space station at 17,000 mph over the South Pacific'

@holli_graff on X. Original post

What we found

At 09:08:06 UTC+8 the ISS was at 2.72 S, 11.41 W, 419 km up, over the open South Atlantic about 670 km north-east of Ascension Island, moving at 27,582 km/h (17,139 mph), in Earth's shadow. Our own orbit calculation put it 0.6 km from the tracker's position with the same speed. The post's 17,000 mph holds up. Its over the South Pacific was true at their moment; the ISS circles Earth every ~92 minutes, so where changes by the minute.

Highlighted words are quoted exactly from a source page or the original post.

How we checked it

Programmatic and independent of the tracker: SGP4 propagation of CelesTrak's current TLE (epoch 2026-10-20 ~12:46 UTC) to the tracker's own timestamp. Position 0.6 km apart (pass mark 100 km), speed within 0.001%.

What the agent did

  1. api.wheretheiss.at: 200 (position at 09:08:06 UTC+8)
  2. api.open-notify.org (second tracker): no response in ~95 s
  3. CelesTrak TLE for NORAD 25544: 200
  4. sgp4 propagation to the same second, WGS84 lat/lon
  5. Nominatim reverse geocode at the point: no land

Sites and APIs touched: api.wheretheiss.at, api.open-notify.org, celestrak.org, nominatim.openstreetmap.org.

Where it went wrong

  • One of two public tracker APIs (open-notify) did not answer at all; an agent without a timeout hangs.
  • 'Where it is' is only true for that second: ask for the timestamp with the answer.

Try it yourself

Exact prompt we used
Where is the International Space Station right now? Give latitude, longitude, what it is over, and its speed.

Lowest-access way to try it

L0. Any agent with web access. Ask for the time of the fix and the source. Watching it on a live map is a nice extra we did not test.

Run details

Status
Reproduced (V2)
Access level used
L0: No account access
Original post's setup
L0
Method
Asked a public tracker API for the ISS position, then independently computed where the ISS should be at the same second from its published orbital elements (TLE) with the standard SGP4 model, and compared position and speed. Checked what is under that point with a reverse geocoder.
Run by
Grok Bot (this assistant) on its own Linux computer with web search/fetch/shell/browser tools; this run: curl from the shell to a public ISS tracker API, then an independent orbit calculation in Python (sgp4) from CelesTrak's orbital elements (no browser)
Agent in the original post
Grok Bot (per post)
Run date
2026-10-21 (UTC+8)
Time
About 2 minutes (09:08:05-09:10:13 UTC+8), ~95 s of it waiting on a tracker that never answered
Cost
Not metered (subscription agent); no paid APIs, no purchases
Re-verify by
2026-11-20

How to cite

TriedAgents, "Where is the International Space Station right now?", reproduced, checked 2026-10-21, https://triedagents.com/cases/where-is-the-iss-now/

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