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 In reply: I had the good luck to observe a 100 km altitude pass of the Raguda-33 R/B in August of 1996 from my home in New Brunswick, Canada. Impressive to say the least - about a 4 degree tail of burning gas behind and VERY fast. In 2004 (?) I was at a conference in Toronto (the year may be wrong) and called Ted Molczan about dropping over for a visit. The Raduga-33 satellite was re-entering that night and visible from Toronto! But it was occurring at 3 AM and I had a heavy day the next day so I passed. Had a chance to witness both the sat and the rocket body re-enter. Kick me. Steve Bolton Lat 45.432 N Long 65.976 W El 100m ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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