In a message dated 3/7/06 2:50:17 PM Eastern Standard Time, grd.holtkamp@t-online.de writes: << I just saw that a small orbit maneuver is planned for the ISS on 15-MAR-06. What is interesting about this particular maneuver is that it will put the ISS right into the path of totality of the total eclipse of the sun on 29-MAR-06 (without this maneuver the ISS would miss totality by little over 4 minutes). The ISS can now expect to see about 23 seconds of totality at 11:00 UT (while over the coast of Southern Turkey). >> I had passed along Gehard's interesting E-mail message about the ISS encountering the upcoming solar eclipse to those on the Solar Eclipse Mailing List (SEML). Below are some comments by astronomer, Dr. Glenn Schneider, who over the years has chased 25 total solar eclipses. -- joe rao Subj: Re: [SEML] ISS eclipse Date: 3/8/06 10:36:35 AM Eastern Standard Time From: gschneider@mac.com (Glenn Schneider) Sender: SEML@yahoogroups.com Reply-to: SEML@yahoogroups.com To: SEML@yahoogroups.com As Michael has reminded us (thank you Michael) not to replicate the content of the two line element sets (for ISS) I certainly won't. Just a word of caution, though. The latest PREDICTIVE elements (from which positional ephemerides can be generated) on the eferenced web site are for the epoch of 18 March (day 77). Bear in mind that using these PRESUMES any planned maneuvers will execute to those plans, and no other (unplanned) maneuvers will take place in the interum before the eclipse. Also, secular errors in the predictive ephemeides in extrapolation will, likely of small uncertainties, but may make very specific in situ eclipse circumstance calculations for ISS still just a bit shakey. But, I will defer to experts in flight dynamics here to estimate the magnitudes of those uncertainties. -GS- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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