RE: formation flying Tiangong 2 16-57A/41765 with ?

Ah, that's right, I completely forgot about the early jettison of the orbital module.  Thanks Jonathan.  For some reason the label "Shenzhou-11 Module" made me think it was implying the whole vehicle, and the orbital module didn't occur to me...which seems silly in hindsight.  My apologies to Scott, et al.

I was also going off of a potentially erroneous memory about ISS...where Spacetrack maintained separate Object ID's for ISS as a whole and for Zarya for a few years after SM arrival, so one could be misled that Zarya was not attached.  Does this ring a bell for anyone, or am I off my rocker?  Anyway, thinking of that, I wondered if this was a case of a "phantom" Shenzhou element set similar to that phantom Zarya element set.  Obviously OBE now.

Since I brought up Tianzhou-1...it rolled out to the launch pad, and Chinese media reports launch is planned between Thursday and Monday.

Tom



-----Original Message-----
From: Seesat-l [mailto:seesat-l-bounces+tom.m.erkenswick=nasa.gov_at_satobs.org] On Behalf Of Tristan Cools via Seesat-l
Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2017 2:06 AM
Cc: SeeSat-L <SeeSat-L_at_satobs.org>
Subject: Re: formation flying Tiangong 2 16-57A/41765 with ?

Yes, Perigee from the Shenzhou 11 orbital module is some 20km lower than Tiangong 2, I would have expected to be much further away along its track, but it was indeed 16061G/41868.

gr, Tristan Cools
BWGS

2017-04-09 0:09 GMT+02:00 Jonathan McDowell via Seesat-l <
seesat-l_at_satobs.org>:

> Shenhzou 11 landed, but unlike for Soyuz the orbital module is 
> jettisoned before retrofire and remains in orbit.
> So it is that.
>
> On 8 April 2017 at 17:13, Erkenswick, Tom M. (JSC-CM341) via Seesat-l 
> < seesat-l_at_satobs.org> wrote:
>
> > Shenzhou-11 undocked and landed back in November 2016, so it's not that.
> >
> > I see no words in the English-language Chinese press to indicate 
> > that
> > Tianzhou-1 was launched.  And the Chinese have been pretty 
> > non-secretive with their human spaceflight launches and events for 
> > several years, including live launch feeds.
> >
> > Maybe it's the Banxing-2 microsat that they released in October 
> > while
> > Shenzhou-11 was docked, the one that took images of the 
> > Tiangong+Shenzhou stack?
> >
> > Tom
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Seesat-l [mailto:seesat-l-bounces+tom.m.erkenswick
> =nasa.gov_at_satobs.
> > org] On Behalf Of Scott Tilley via Seesat-l
> > Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2017 3:26 PM
> > To: seesat-l_at_satobs.org
> > Subject: Re: formation flying Tiangong 2 16-57A/41765 with ?
> >
> > This would be Shenzhou-11 Module, 41868, 16-016G. Object is shows up 
> > in today's spacetrack data.
> >
> > s
> >
> >
> > On 4/8/2017 12:53 PM, Tristan Cools via Seesat-l wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Only the second time I observed the Chinese Space station as I get 
> > > only low passes here over Belgium, but what a surprise;  another 
> > > object was flying synchronous some 2deg SE of it.  Brightness 
> > > about mag +1 and the other object maybe +3.  Observation time 19:36UTC.
> > >
> > > Can somebody confirm this or is there any news ?
> > >
> > > I took some pictures of it, but with allmost full moon I would be 
> > > surprised if I could catch the two objects.
> > >
> > > gr, tristan cools
> > > Belgian Working Group Satellites/BWGS 
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