Thursday evening (early April 14 UTC) I had twilight Highfly and Quicksat predictions for "FREGAT RB/CLUS" (26106, 00-015A) -- not knowing what it was. I'm still not exactly sure what it is (a launch vehicle with payload attached?), but it turned out to be quite bright (at least +2, maybe +1), steady, and moved very rapidly. Its RCS is listed as 12 sq. meters. Just now I finally checked an elset and found that it's in a highly eccentric orbit. This is lifted from the select.tle file: Fregat r/ Cluster 2 18002 x 247 km 1 26106U 00015A 00105.06922422 .00007595 00000-0 64658-3 0 241 2 26106 64.6380 120.7463 5726389 5.6491 358.7821 4.49807968 1080 It's currently making northbound evening twilight passes through Mexico, the central USA, and Canada and returns every other night. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 15 2000 - 00:07:47 PDT