Some days ago Kevin Fetter informed us about this decay be sending the link: http://www.aerospace.org/cords/reentry-predictions/upcoming-reentries/2011-073b/ Without following this link I knew about this upcoming decay. How? On June 30th I received an e-mail from a fellow amateur who was observing variable star V450 Aql (19:33:46, +5:27:56) . Time was 23:59 (which is 21:59 UT) when a very slow moving satellite was nearby. No flashes and about magnitude +6. As usual I try to identify such objects. Observer was at 51°5'13"N en 4°30'37"E I had some trouble as I could not find a matching satellite. By using TLE's as short as possible to the observation time I eventually found a candidate: 2011-073B. By using TLE's from a day after of before, this object did not appear in the field of view and therefore I missed it. When I compared the perigee and apogee heights of this object it was not difficult to see it would soon decay. Epoch time June 30 at 7:10 - perigee 95.3 km - apogee 7142.4 km Epoch time July 1 at 8:27 - perigee 95.8 km -apogee 6244.1 km Bram Dorreman Site 4160: 51.27931 N, 5.47683 E, 35 m (WGS84) _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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