John asked: > Can anyone tell me how noticeable this burn will be as far as > ground track is concerned ?......and if the TLEs incorporating the burn > are yet available ? Elsets covering all orbital phases of the mission are available via this web page (hit the red icon): http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/elements/index.html At the moment, that page appears to be the same one posted pre-launch, but based on past behaviour, it is likely to be updated at least several times during the mission, so when you need precise predictions, check for updates as late as possible before you observe. The table at the top of the page lists all remaining planned manoeuvres. See the column IMPULSIVE TIG, for their date and time. The rightmost column lists the apogee and perigee height (HA, HP) in nautical miles, by which you can easily tell whether the effect of the manoeuvre will be large or small (at least for those that are mostly in-plane). State vectors in Cartesian and TLE form are presented for each manoeuvre on the remainder of the page. They are presented for "Coasting arcs" which cover the period between successive orbital manoeuvres. For example, on the pre-launch page, the first manoeuvre time in the table was on day 207/15:17:08.227 GMT (aka UTC). Scanning through the page, I find a match in "Coasting Arc #2 ...", which states a Vector Time (GMT): 2005/207/15:17:41.987 shortly after the manoeuvre. It would be nice if the table of manoeuvres included a reference or a link to the corresponding coasting arc #. Perhaps I will send in a suggestion. Perhaps someone could write a script to link to the page and extract a subset of the data, containing, say, only the starting and ending time of each coasting arc, and the corresponding TLE, something like what I did manually pre-launch: http://satobs.org/seesat/Jul-2005/0224.html Ted Molczan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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