Hi All, I took Mike's suggestion and ran the elsets of #'s 25942, 26119, 26121, 26123 and 26143 through ALLCOLA to see if any common dates/times showed up. As Mike discovered, March 11th is the critical date. All but 26121 were close to one another in the 13:00 - 13:08 UT time frame. (Not surprising that 26121 has the greatest divergence -- it has the highest mean motion of acceleration.) Running with ALLDAT.TLE, others were also in the mix, including 26122 (J), 26125 (M), 26126 (N), 26129 (R), and 26143 (AF). Also, checking the archives I see that on April 7th, Ted Molczan wrote: "I strongly suspect that Russell Eberst's unknown of 4 April 2000 is the rocket body 99057C, or an as yet uncatalogued fragment. Here is my analysis ... <snip>" I concur -- COLA is pinging this elset as part of the mix. One final thought: I believe the running assumption is that the rocket body exploded due to unspent propellant. Isn't this at least the second CZ that has created a large debris field? I realize that the U.S. is just as guilty with the huge debris field from STEP 2 Pegasus, but it seems irresponsible to continue to launch a booster with a none propensity to pollute LEO with dozens or even hundreds of fragments. --Rob ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Mon Apr 17 2000 - 18:49:32 PDT