Routersaurus Rex asked, > Can a Geostationary sat be repositioned? > Not simple station keeping, but moved thousands of kilometers to another > position? Sure, easily, by doing a small thruster burn to change its period from exact geosynchronicity, letting it "drift" to the new location (which is what the operators actually call the operation) and then doing a reciprocal burn to restore the period to 1 rev/day. IIRC, LES-9 was moved most of the way around the planet to cover Desert Storm in this way. > Seems to me a GS sat would make a good spy platform if it could be moved > about, of course the extreme altitude would cause difficulties. The US' GEO SIGINT platforms have been known to shift around a bit, and there's a developing story about a GEO satellite inspector that drifts around looking at/listening to other satellites. Optical reconnaissance of the ground from GEO would need a pretty big aperture, though a Hubble-class mirror could get 10-meter SPOT-like pictures. > Oh, another thing, are there *any* satellites that in equitorial orbits that > circle the earth to the west? No, there are some that are seriously retrograde (the Israeli Ofeq satellites, for example), but none really close to 180 degree inclination that I know of. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Tue Apr 25 2000 - 12:40:22 PDT