Dear all, Here is something to look forward to: ESA's comet chaser ROSETTA is going to make a earth flyby on march 4th. Perigee is at 22:09:28 UTC, about 2000 km above the southern tip of Baja California. Best visibility should occur an hour earlier from Africa and Europe, where the probe will be high above the horizon at a at least 10th mag. In order to enable amateur astronomers to observe the flyby, ESA provided up to date orbit information to the people of the JPL Horizons system, http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eph In the nights before, visibilty is favourable almost anywhere on the planet since Rosetta will be approaching from the opposite side of the sun. Since the spacecraft will be quite faint during the approach, a CCD equipped telescope should be necessary to observe it. Please find attached links to a groundtrack plot and tabular data describing the flyby. Both files were kindly provided by Trevor Morley of ESA/ESOC. http://www.higashiyama.de/Xchange/Rosetta_groundtrack.jpg http://www.higashiyama.de/Xchange/Rosetta_flyby.dat Regards, Rainer ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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