Bram Dorreman has reported observing what appears to be the NROL-34 NOSS pair, on 2011 Apr 18 just prior to 20:07 UTC. They were very close in time to the 79936 revised search elset I posted earlier today. As expected, the plane was several degrees off. I have adjusted the RAAN and mean anomaly of 79936 to fit Bram's observation of the leading object. 1 79936U 11014A 11108.81132140 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 05 2 79936 63.4167 343.3641 0132437 179.7269 180.3850 13.39700000 06 No doubt, there is some error in the mean motion, so predictions will not be exact, but I hope this will be sufficient for observers to easily locate the object. I will adopt the official 37386 catalogue number for the leader once we have reasonably reliable elements for it. The trailing object was about 15.6 s in time behind the leader, which is likely slowly growing. I plan to produce an elset for it once an additional observation becomes available. I suggest reporting observations of the trailer with the COSPAR ID 11014B, and catalogue number 79937. As I was about to send this message, Marco Langbroek reported his suspected observation of one of the NROL-34 NOSS, made at the same time as Bram's, which appears to match the leader (11014A). Both positions were close in track to the above orbit, but the first one was ~10 S early, and the second one ~9 S late, indicating that the times corresponding to both ends of the image trail needed to be swapped; doing so resolved the discrepancy. Ted Molczan _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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