Re: Brief Intro

Jim Holland (GalaxyJH@Worldnet.att.net)
Sun, 19 Jul 1998 22:06:49 -0400

G Becker wrote:

> Quickly
>
> My name is Greg Becker.  Currently a student at Washington State
> University, although in about 6 months I will be Chemistry/Earth Science
> teacher at the high school level.  I am VERY NEW to this, in fact, with
> the assistance of my SATspy program I managed to see nothing last
> night.  Hopefully, I can do a tad better than that.  I plan to
> incorporate some of these observations into an astronomy curriculum if I
> can get it going.
>
> One question, can someone point me in the right direction as far as the
> Iridium flare phenomena are concerned?  Was wondering how many Iridium
> sattelites there are, and how many are actually functional.  Seems as
> though half of them are spinning out of control or something.  Thanks
> for your time, hope to hear more of your observations soon.

Greg,

There are currently 66 Irdium sats in orbit. They are all in a low orbit
(450 miles) and as far as I
know they are all operational. As you may know the Iridium sats are a
network of communication
satellites used for paging and telephones. Check out http://www.iridium.com
for tons of info on the
iridium system.

Jim H.

>

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