I've been going over the lengthy series of fragments that resulted from the first on-orbit breakup, namely, 1961-omicron, or 1961-015 as it is now designated, and I suspect two of the supposed fragments from this launch are actually the despin weights from the Transit 4A satellite (1961-015A). How to tell? Well, I have a couple of Goddard Satellite Situation Reports from 1986-87 and in them two from the series have orbits listed separately from the inclusive "omicron 3-271" (the series is a bit longer than 271 now) listing for the remaining fragments. This suggests that someone, somewhere at NORAD somehow managed to identify those two objects as >not< being from the on-orbit breakup. They are 1961 omicron 23 and 1961 omicron 39, now known as 1961-015Y and 1961-015AQ (catalogue numbers 138 and 154, respectively). The orbital elements indicate that 138 would be the high despin weight (thrown forward) and 154 the low one (thrown backward). (Jonathan McDowell's table suggests 015S and 013T are the despin weights, but with question marks; this is what got me to thinking about the despin weights in the first place.) Does anyone out there have any more information about this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 26 2006 - 17:00:38 EST