> Just wondering if anyone knows the magnitude for the following geo sats. > > 1966-053D 02217 US No current elements > OPS 9313 (IDSCS 3) Launched (1966/06/16) > > 1979-105E 11684 CIS 1459.2 14.5 36304 36170 1.6745 > SL-12 R/B(2) Launched (1979/12/28) > Kevin, the first one is relatively small satellite (26 faces polyhedron with 0.9 m diameter) and it's hard to track. There are 27 sats of this type orbiting Earth in near-GEO vicinity. Just 8 of them are tracking by the US SpaceCom on a regular basis. TLEs for others distributed through OIG web-server are just estimated ones for search purposes and are not real orbits determined from observations. IDSCS has visible magnitude at about 15m and you need good instrument to track them. Interesting, that the SpaceCom didn't recovered yet most of them despite of a large number of powerful optical sensors used for GEO surveillance. The second object is a standard upper stage using for launching GEO sats by Russian Proton-K launcher. It's a cylinder by 3.7 m diameter and 6.29 m length. It has visible magnitude in range 9.5-13 depending of observation conditions. This tumbling objects can be easily observed with CCD-equipped 10-15 cm aperture instrument. Best regards, Vladimir Agapov ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 22 2001 - 09:43:43 PDT