> According to my program and present ISS tle (2004-04-16 11:52:19Z), I get 04 Nov 2005 16:54:03 UT. That would be ± a day or two! Thanks, that agrees pretty well with Mr. Heger's value. I assume that both your and his projections are for natural, unboosted decay? BTW, I did a quick exercise with dividers on the Heavens Above ISS altitude chart and came up with rough numbers that may help characterize the period from mid-April 2003 to mid-April 2004. In that time, the actual decrease in mean altitude ("height") was about 30 km. During that time, there were four reboosts that raised the height by a total of about 11 km -- in other words, the total natural decay was about 41 km, and reboosts made up 11 km of that. Another measure is how much time was bought by the reboosts. For each reboost, I measured the approximate time it took for the height to decay to its pre-reboost value. Adding those up, it came to 13 weeks; since the overall decay curve is approximately linear over the one-year period covered, that's what you'd expect, of course: 11/41 ~= 13/52. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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