Hi All ... Word has it that CGRO actually re-entered at 06:13z [2:13am ET], over the Pacific southeast of Hawaii. The operations-side of things was VERY smooth, with very few concerns. The third burn this evening went off well. The subsequent (low) perigee passing got the attention of the attitude-control guy, who stated that there were obvious aerodynamic torques with thrusters firing (essentially continuously) -- and that he hoped we would not have to do this again on the next orbit. Burn #4 also went smoothly, and we transitioned to the desired parking attitude for the ride down to the ocean. We were each looking at our individual subsystems to try and detect anything anomalous. However, it winds up that there was VERY little to catch ... at the very end, we had a minute or so of detectable attitude control errors and rates diverging (confirmation that CGRO was tumbling due to atmospheric drag overcoming the thruster control), and 1 report of temperatures jumping 40-degrees F. [I could not confirm this on my own temperature display page.] Then, we lost telemetry -- and had to await NORAD confirmation of re-entry, which came by 6:18z. We were all quite pleased -- but amazed -- that things went so smoothly. Tho a shame that we had to kill off science operations -- this was still a neat -- and GREAT learning -- experience! Steve Walter ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jun 04 2000 - 02:08:15 PDT