In Jonathan Wojack's report of his observations on 2000 June 8 from 01:37 to 02:45 UTC, he reported that one predicted object failed to appear, and that three others were more than 1 minute early, and in one case, significantly off course. Elements were less than one day old. This led him to ask: > Has anyone observed anything like this - seemingly the > affects of a space > weather storm? The geomagnetic storm began about 9 h after Jonathan's observations, so it could not have been the cause of the apparent early arrivals. Even if the storm had hit hours before his observations, its effect on the time of arrival would have been much smaller than 1 minute. I observed USA 129 last night, hours after the geomagnetic storm, and it was on course, and within a fraction of 1 second of the predicted time, using 2 day old elements. That is not to say that a significant increase in rate of decay did not occur, but it would be very apparent after only a few hours. The object that failed to appear, was passing close to the moon. If it was fainter than expected, then it may have been obscured by moonlight. Assuming that accurate timings were made, the off-course/early arrivals could be due to mistaken identity, i.e. an object other than the one predicted, following a similar, but not identical path. It is an all too common problem due to the large number of objects in orbit. Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Fri Jun 09 2000 - 03:32:57 PDT