At 13:45 23/04/00 , Mark Hanning-Lee wrote: >I forgot to check this for some days, but just ran a check against >mccants.tle with a mag 15 limit and a very high perigee / range. To my >surprise 23609 USA 112 is a good match, az 34 deg el 14 deg. If anyone's >interested I can send the Skymap .cfg file that I used. >Leo Barhorst's recent posting marks USA 112 as (Trumpet 2?). It is guessed that its a Trumpet satellite rather than an SDS(comsat) satellite because of the higher perigee. Trumpet satellites are suppossed to be listening for radio transmissions and its supposed to have a large dish or phased array. The orbit is a 12 hour synchronous orbit like the Molniya commsats. It passes overhead here once a day, currently in shadow around midnight. Its a companion to USA103 , whose ascending node differs by 120 degrees. >I'm surprised that a sat could flash 11 mag brighter than predicted, but >I guess some high-orbit (near GEO) sats can flash real bright. Why not, Irdiums change by 13 magnitudes if you are in the center of a sun glint. Both USA103 and USA112 were first detected by Rob McNaught as they sun glinted to a brightness brighter than mag -2 while in the field of view of his all-sky camera network doing fireball patrol work. A member of my local Astro Society who lives about 80Km south of my location saw USA 103 flare up to mag -1.5 a couple of months ago. Some 2-4 square meters of mirror surface is enough. Tony Beresford ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 22 2000 - 22:56:54 PDT