Hey all: I appreciate your feedback concerning Mars Odyssey R/B 1. I went out this morning armed with a good near-zenith plot, and I took a look at a star-chart overlay showing the booster flying close to Vega. I just came in from this observation and saw nothing. Either the elsats I am using or wrong, or the booster is to darn dim to see. However, if the estimate of mag. ~3 holds, I should be able to see it. I tracked Cosmos 1689 R/B this morning in a beautiful horizon-to-horizon pass, and H-A listed this booster as mag 3.8 .. so Mars Odyssey R/B should be an easy object. =) BTW Cosmos 1689 R/B was not even close to mag 3.8 .. probably closer to 2 .. the booster entered the shadows near Scoripus and was nearly as bright as Beta Scorpii (listed as mag 2.55) Perhaps Mars Odyssey R/Bs orbit is decaying rapidly or has changed. I saw the object listed on decay lists as upcoming for mid-June. This has turned out to be a fascinatingly challenging object!! In case you were wondering, I use PocketSat on my Handspring Visor for plots and I cross-check them with H-A data. Pocketsat has been very accurate for most satellites I have seen. Regards: Brad _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 24 2001 - 03:33:41 PDT