It's the kind of story we were accustomed to if it came to shuttle launches but for Soyuz this is rather unusual. At 2 min 17 sec before scheduled liftoff (planned for 16:28:10 UTC, 19-JUL-06) the countdown for Metop was stopped (I don't know the reason for it yet). This has been the third launch attempt in as many days. I've heard different rumours about how this will continue. Apparently consideration is given to try again before re-servicing Metop (which would entail a delay of several weeks). It seems to be possible that they make the next attempt on the upcoming weekend but even a launch tomorrow (20-JUL-06) is not yet ruled out (I would find that rather unlikely though). I guess it depends a lot on the exact cause of the latest scrub. There should be some conference tomorrow morning (European Time) and then we may (or may not) know. I hope to have fresh orbit elements available in time before the next launch attempt to post them here. (As a last resort you could take formerly posted TLEs and simply change the Right Ascension by adding 0.985626 for each additional day and change the epoch by changing the day of the year but leaving the decimals the same. That works because the launch time remains almost the same.) What a pitty, I really had been looking forward to observing Metop tonight and the sky would have been just fine. Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jul 19 2006 - 15:54:56 EDT