J.P. Bagby was an advocate of small natural satellites of the Earth. He based his speculations on the minimal amount of evidence. So here are a couple of tales from 40 years ago. In 1965, the rocket of Cosmos 61 exploded in orbit scattering about 150 bits of debris into individual orbits. While NORAD were sorting out the numerous fixes they received from their sensors, no orbits were published. So when I observed an object in a 56-degree inclined orbit, there were no matching orbits available for identifying it. I therefore called it an 'unknown'. Bagby latched on to this report and decided that it was a potential natural Earth satellite, mentioning it in one of his papers. However, somewhat later when orbits for the debris were published, I was able to identify the object as 1965-20P, which turned out to be the largest piece, and was referred to as the rocket. So that suggestion was thoroughly refuted. At the end of 1965, Cosmos 100 was launched, and designated 65-106A. However, the object tracked under that designation was very probably the last stage rocket. Its orbit was considerably more eccentric (e=.012) than the other object from that launch 65-106B (e=.002). NORAD decided to swap their identities. So in the monthly SATELLITE SITUATION REPORT published by GSFC, there was an apparent sudden huge change in the values of perigee/apogee heights for these two objects. For 65-106A, the value for perigee height (after months of being near 566 km) suddenly jumped to around 630 km. Bagby ascribed these massive alterations to the gravitational influence of natural Earth satellites, but they were clearly the result of attempt to correct the initial error in identifying the payload and rocket of this launch. >The author also describes "natural" posigrade objects: >1) Semimajor axis= 2.147 Earth radii, .502 eccentricity, 43.45 inclincation. >2) Semimajor axis= 2.147 Earth radii, .51 eccentricity, 44.12 inclincation. >3) Semimajor axis= 2.126 Earth radii, .516 eccentricity, 44.35 inclincation. >4) Semimajor axis= 2.129 Earth radii, .399 eccentricity, 48. inclincation. The third object listed has a perigee radius of 1.029 earth radii. [p=a(1-e)] This is a height of 185 km [0.029*6378km]. Such an orbit will decay to re-entry very quickly. This was the case with many such 'Bagby' candidates. On a statistical consideration, it was totally unlikely that many natural satellites would all reach 're-entry' virtually simultaneously from widely differing orbits (e.g. very different inclinations.) So I gave little or no credence to his theories, and have heard no more of them for a few decades. Best wishes, Russell Eberst 55.9486N, 3.1383W, 150 feet = 46 metres above MSL ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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