Heavens-Above allows you already to select Metop (MetOp-A) but be advised that you should not yet generate any predictions for it with H.A. as their orbit elements are about half a revolution out of step with the actually planned ones (at least at the moment of this posting - 19 UTC, 14-JUL-06). Maybe they fix it before Monday's launch; otherwise as soon as Spacetrack posts Metop elements after the launch the situation will probably remedy itself. (So a day after launch you should be safe.) The following is the planned insertion state vector for Metop (which I got from Metop flight dynamics): Elements in J2000. EPOCH: 2006/07/17-17:36:53.560 UTC X 522.81136 Y -2427.98222 Z -6764.74918 Vx -1.8691329 Vy -6.8111776 Vz 2.30034444 From this I get the following TLEs (which I already posted earlier): Metop Sep 1 99999U 06099A 06198.73395324 .00000028 00000-0 26562-4 0 1 2 99999 98.7337 257.5914 0024535 156.6977 131.5842 14.21428546 1 I should add that these TLEs are not as perfect as I would like them. They show deviations up to 30 km from the numeric propagation of the state vector (Usually when generating TLEs out of state vectors my deviations are only about 2 or 3 km - I don't know why I got this fairly large deviation here.) Still this would mean an error of only 4 seconds or so and the above TLEs should be more than adequate to locate Metop in the hours after launch. (And keep in mind that the insertion might not be perfect! I think 2 or 3 seconds either way might not be uncommon.) Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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