The NASA animation made me realize what should have been obvious from the beginning : the split-off belt of satellites represents a population that has RAAN and inclination values that are clustered in some narrow range. (Thanks, Thomas!) Well, if you plot a histogram of the RAAN, you do see a wide peak around 60 degrees. What is even more interesting is that the satellites lying within this belt have an amazing (to me, at least) correlation between the RAAN and inclination values. I have posted the plots here in case anyone is interested : c15_manali.tripod.com/geo/geo.htm Any explanations about this phenomenon? Is there some technical reason to deliberately use such orbits, or is it that abandoned satellites tend to gravitate into this kind of orbit -- a la "strange attractor" ? Regards, Praveen ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Fly" <thomasfly@j2ee-consultants.com> To: "SeeSat-L" <SeeSat-L@satobs.org> Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2003 9:53 PM Subject: Re: Distribution of Geosynchronous Satellites > NASA has a cute Java applet at > http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/3D/JTrack3D.html that may help > you see what's going on. [edited] ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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