Jonathan McDowell wrote: "... DSCS III A-3 and its IABS (Integrated Apogee Boost Subsystem) apogee stage into a 234 x 35780 km x 25.5 deg. [orbit]. The IABS will fire its twin R-4D bipropellant engines on Mar 13 to circularize the orbit, and separate from DSCS after a final burn around Mar 15." I was just wondering if this burn, and separation, might be visible to someone somewhere. With the Centaurs, as I saw for myself last year in Mike's telescope, it wasn't just the venting of the excess fuel that was visible. Other events were fairly obvious. I don't know how the IABS would compare to a Centaur, but maybe the circularization burn might be fairly similar. Of course we would need to know the location (equator above the Indian Ocean, about 85 east? -- looking at the ground-track map on Spaceflightnow.com) and time of the burn.... Saw a few flaring geosats last night, but conditions weren't too good (cirrus and moonlight). USA 81 (92-023A, 21949) did its magnitude +2 sparkling event from about 2:31:58 to 2:32:17 March 11 UTC. (Someone ought to photograph this one and USA 32 -- a time exposure to show the bright sparkly track.) Cosmos 2366 Rk (25893) PPAS report, only three cycles before shadow entry: 99-045 B 03-03-11 03:11:20 EC 49.6 0.5 3 16.5 I find trying to time 88-080B, Feng Yun 1 Rk (19468) to be a real test. Usually it seems to have a long maximum and a short one, but occasionally it does a flash also. And when I look at my clicks, they look like a mess, e.g., from March 7: 8.89, 10.84, 9.07, 11.74, 19.71, 23.34, 17.21, 17.94, 1.70, 21.86 (end 2:48:28 UTC). Maybe it's 40-something seconds? But last night: 12.04, 17.38, .89, 17.50, 3.00 (end 2:40:42 Mar 11 UTC). That last 3 seconds, and probably the 1.70 on March 7, was due to trying to catch the middle of a flat maximum. Tried unsuccessfully to see Gorizont 16 a few minutes before and after 2:00 UTC. BCRC, 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 11 2003 - 05:45:54 EST