Hi All, > On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Paul J Henney wrote: > > I am a little confused about the sataus of the BRIZ 3 stage from Sundays > > ROCKOT launch..the website says that the stage was to carry out > a deorbit > > burn about 100 mins into the flight. > > Did this happen or is the stage still in orbit? As part of the GRACE team here at GSOC, I think I can answer this one. The Briz upper stage did indeed perform a de-orbit burn a few minutes after separation of the GRACE-1 and 2 spacecraft which happened about 90 minutes after launch. However, not enough fuel was left to bring down the perigee far enough to cause an immediate re-entry, but rather it was brought down to around 150 km and the rest of the job will be left to the atmosphere over the next few days. Both spacecraft are performing well apart from a minor problem with the gyros, and they should make an interesting sight flying in formation with about 200 km along track separation. Unfortunately, they are only currently visible from extreme latitudes. They are based on the same bus as the CHAMP satellite and so should have a similar intrinsic magnitude. Regards, Chris Chris Peat Heavens-Above GmbH E-Mail: chris.peat@heavens-above.com Web site: www.heavens-above.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 20 2002 - 02:38:47 EST