RE: Brazil Reentry seen from Cerro Paranal (Chile)

From: Ted Molczan via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:19:07 -0500
Cees Bassa wrote:

> As the image has no time information on the trail except for the start
> time of the exposure, I have used the exposure start for the first
> measurement and manually/iteratively adjusted the timestamps of each
> consecutive measurement by fitting a 200 km circular orbit (16.2722
> revs/day mean motion) to the observations fitting for mean anomaly,
> ascending node and inclination. This approach should allow for
> reasonable guesses of the orbital inclination and RA of the ascending
> node, assuming a circular orbit. The resulting orbit has an
> inclination of about 25 degrees.
> 
> 1 99999U 14862C   14362.19593750  .00000000  00000-0  50000-4 0    03
> 2 99999  24.7924 171.4723 0001000   0.0000 284.7256 16.27220000    05
> # 20141228.20-20141228.20, 8 measurements, 0.279 deg rms
> 
> Since the reentry trail passed over Cerro Paranal at 75 deg elevation,
> the orbital inclination is not very sensitive to the precise altitude
> of the trail, should it deviate from 200 km (or have a significant
> eccentricity).
> 
> The estimated orbit passes very close to Santa Rita do Pardo where the
> debris was found and confirms that debris belongs to the reentry trail
> observed from Chile.

On the RentryWatch mailing list, Joseph Remis has proposed that the re-entry was of the Falcon 9 rocket body 2014-052B /
40142. The object was last updated by USSTRATCOM on Dec 19 UTC, when it was in a 25.5 deg, 105 X 10706 km orbit. Joseph
propagated it to this final orbit:

1 40142U 14052B   14362.14561576 9.99999999  50000+2  40735-2 0 00003
2 40142  25.4291 172.5189 0171354 315.6180  43.0211 16.36884005  2930

My effort to confirm this using Satevo yielded this result:

1 40142U 14052B   14362.16559196 6.00782537  38275 2  33684-2 0 90609
2 40142  25.4202 171.3074 0326827 317.6835  39.8403 15.89135640  2957

Both are in the ball-park of the sightings, but mine are somewhat late. Both bear a strong resemblance to your elements,
Cees. This looks very promising.

Ted Molczan


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Received on Sun Dec 28 2014 - 17:19:42 UTC

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