Ruben Velasco <heston@arrakis.es> said, > At 14:22 2000/02/28 EST, DeHBeaver0@aol.com wrote: > > >Satellites cannot travel from East to West! That would be going AGAINST the > >earths rotation. You must have seen something else. > > In 1997 the spanish Minisat-01 satellite was launched westwards from the > Canary Islands over the Atlantic. Incl: 29° retrog. I HAD to say it :-) Correct, also the Israeli Ofeq satellites and a couple launched from Vandenberg back in the 1960s went into highly retrograde orbits. The Ofeqs are around 47 deg retrograde, IIRC. (They launched from Israel out over the Strait of Gibraltar to avoid spooking nervous neighbors). There is a payload penalty to be paid for going into such orbits, but they're perfectly attainable. There are many mildly retrograde polar orbiting satellites with inclinations in the 90 -100 degree range. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Mon Feb 28 2000 - 15:30:25 PST