This is just some casual speculation building on what I read in Bill Harwood's article, and I haven't looked at the elements or thought this through carefully. But since there were a lot of messages about how this adjustment might affect the position of the shuttle, I thought I'd try giving an intuitive explanation. It sounds like NASA wants to create a landing opportunity at Edwards one orbit before Atlantis would have (on its original orbit) had a shot there. On this orbit, therefore, the Atlantis groundtrack would have been too far east, and NASA wants to nudge the groundtrack west. Since the earth is turning west-to-east under the orbit, this is accomplished by giving the earth more time to rotate before the shuttle crosses a given latitude. To do this, the shuttle needs to run late relative to its original timing. Thus, the orbital period needs to be increased, and that's done by raising the orbit. So I would expect to see Atlantis fall behind relative to its original trajectory. Also, here's a wide-angle photo of Atlantis and ISS last night from Boston, in a 10-second exposure: http://photo.ztn.net/static/satellites/sts117.jpg Sean Sullivan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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