Ted Molczan said: > I agree with Rob Matson's finding that the object is Radsat > (1972-076B / 6217). Yes, that appears to nail it. > I question whether the broken trail of its image is due to > flashing by Radsat. I wondered about that too. I don't think it's an instrumental (CCD) effect, since the pulsing is so well-spaced. I found an image of the satellite, and it is a polyhedron, an ocotogonal (or more) prism. We could be seeing flashes off of its surfaces. Also, the pulsation in the image appears to change, indicating we may be seeing a high-rate periodic pulsing on top of a slower one, perhaps the 5 second spin of the satellite, if it is still spinning. All in all, an interesting catch. And I'll add that RADSAT is a gamma-ray detector... While the 'scope we used for this observation was built with funding by GLAST, a gamma-ray satellite being built by NASA now. We're using it to observe gamma ray sources, so there is a nice little irony here! -Phil ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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