Chris said: >> (79 x 1,550 km) > it seems like it might be a mistake? Not a mistake. Highly eccentric orbit satellites, especially the Molniyas, often end their lives with many days or even weeks in the 70-80 km perigee regime. Lunisolar perturbations dip the perigee down to 70-80 km, while the apogee is up at 20 to 40 thousand km. On each pass, the satellite dows oops does heat up a lot, and loses a lot of velocity due to friction, dropping the apogee by many km per pass. But the apogee's so high, and the perigee velocity is so fast, that the satellite survives in orbit for an extended time - many tens of revolutions even. It's not uncommon for bits to fall off and generate short lived debris, but the main satellite does remain tracked in orbit until the apogee drops to a few hundred km and so the perigee velocity isn't fast enough to survive an atmosphere pass. Just unintentional aerobraking - kind of like the Mars Recon Orbit is doing intentionally at Mars right now. Jonathan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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