All - One of the interesting things that you can see if you look at the TLEs for various high eccentricity objects is some odd behavior in apogee and perigee. Many high eccentricity objects, when their perigee gets down to the neighborhood of 500 km or so, show a near-sinusoidal variation in perigee while the apogee tends to show a steady decrease. We currently have one object in the list that has a low perigee - one object that does not have orbital parameters available from Space-Track - and it is the object with the lowest perigee. That is object 41941, an upper stage from a Japanese geo comm satellite. There appears to be little reason for the US to hide the orbital parameters for this object, probably it was classified a few years ago and might have been forgotten. There are other objects with similar orbits that were classified and now show in the Satellite Catalog (11720, 16591, etc). Anyway 41941 is kind of odd because the perigee appears to be steadily decreasing while the apogee is increasing. That is unusual. If anyone had any spare time - could they track 41941? I would like to have some more points to plot. I did mention the fact that it might have been overlooked to the CSpOC, hopefully they will realize that it is not in the Satellite Catalog and will declassify the TLE. Thanks. Charles Phillips Spaceflight Research, LLC Houston, Texas 713-882-4578 sites.google.com/site/spaceflightresearchprojects/ _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Tue Jun 30 2020 - 11:19:35 UTC
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