Phillip Clark is probably referring to a report from S Africa of what appears to be the impact on April 27th of a chunk of satellite debris into a field 25 km from Worcester which lies about 100 km ENE of Cape Town. This report appeared in a message from Keith Gottschalk in the FPspace mailing list this (UK) afternoon, quoting an article in the "Saturday Argus". Unfortunately, no time is mentioned, though, with farmers and labourers nearby at the time, it was almost certainly in daylight. As Phil mentions, there were two decays on that day: #26302 (00- 21 B = Progress M1-2 Soyuz rocket) and #23834 (96- 19 B = GPS 2-25 Delta 2 rocket). #26302 had a SE-wards pass over central and eastern South Africa at about 08:05 UTC, but did not pass near Worcester. The epoch of the final elset is a few minutes later than this, but that elset is clearly suspect, with a negative drag term. Both SpaceCom and I put this decay a couple of hour later, at 10:42 and 10:51 respectively, when the orbit could not have taken it over S Africa. However, if this is satellite debris, I am sure that it came from #23834, the Delta 2. SpaceCom put the decay of this at 13:18 UTC near 21.8 S, 16.0 W, over the S Atlantic. I estimated 13:29 UTC near 34.0 S, 52.3 E, which is SE of Madagascar. Between these two positions, there is ESE pass over the SW tip of S Africa that passes very close to Worcester. If it had been in orbit, the pass above Worcester would have occurred at 13:22 UTC. Given the retardation during re-entry, and the time to fall to the ground, my estimate of when the debris might have landed is 13:26 UTC. It would be interesting to know if this time is consistent with the reports from the ground. The final published elset for #23834 is: GPS 2-25 r1 5.9 2.4 0.0 5.0 v 12 144 x 127 km 1 23834U 96019B 00118.51427727 .42079649 13253-5 33611-3 0 8671 2 23834 35.0267 183.8600 0012991 171.4994 189.0574 16.51367527228838 This is for the beginning of that decay orbit and is in close agreement (showing it only 1.4 seconds early) with the prediction I had posted 6 hours earlier. It was 3.9 sec early against the prediction I'd posted almost 20 hours earlier. Alan -- Alan Pickup | COSPAR 2707: 55d53m48.7s N 3d11m51.2s W 156m asl Edinburgh | Tel: +44 (0)131 477 9144 Fax: +44 (0)870 0520750 Scotland | SatEvo page: http://www.wingar.demon.co.uk/satevo/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Sun Apr 30 2000 - 11:47:47 PDT