Hello, > ... If an outage occurs, there's a > delay until the two planes coincide, but a spare can then be boosted > from the intermediate orbit into the operational plane in which the > failure occurred. since all Iridiums have about the same inclination and orbit type, there is no relative drift between the orbital planes and because of the very near polar orbit no variation of RA of ascend. node at all. This is very good news for a satellite constallation ;-), everything is somehow static in space. So I think the new satellites are spare units for one orbital plane only. But perhaps they go their own ways with some RA change maneuvers, if needed. Cheers, Sebastian http://www.sebastian-stabroth.de ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 12 2002 - 17:58:17 EST