A few years ago I put together a set of elements for Sputnik 1 and its booster by using observations, contemporary newspaper reports and an observatory logbook from what used to be East Germany. The Sputnik 1 elements I got by starting out with the R/B elements and taking into account the newspaper reports about the radio contact times over various places on Earth. A mean drag coefficient I arrived at by running a numerical simulation for the R/B and Sputnik so that their reentry times (dates) came out alright. The following TLEs seem to be good to within 3 minutes or so for most of October 1957. Sputnik 1 R/B 1 1 57001A 57277.80972234 0.00629914 00000-0 27300-2 0 4 2 1 65.1000 339.9400 0510880 70.1160 334.6900 14.93980000 8 Sputnik 1 1 2 57001B 57277.80972234 0.00352343 00000-0 15670-2 0 1 2 2 65.1000 339.9400 0510880 70.1160 334.6900 14.93980000 9 The elset for the R/B agrees particularly well with a picture taken at Rodewisch school observatory (50.53 N, 12.42 E) at 3:51 UTC, 13-OCT-1957 which shows the booster passing UMa. This is probably the first picture of a satellite trail taken in Europe (my guess is that some folks in Australia might have taken pictures two or three days earlier as Sputnik had a good evening visibility there - does anyone know about earlier pictures? If you live down under could you check your newspaper archives?). Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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