Hey Markus,
I wonder where Rick was looking and when he saw
the satellites. The vernal geosynchronous satellite
(geosat) flare season began in late February and will
run through to mid-April. For most of us on Earth it
only really lasts a week or so to see *visible*
flaring geosats if we don't move from our latitude.
But for those in orbits inclined like the ISS/Shuttle
- they would have the entire season *and* almost every
night side of every rev!
I've asked several people at NASA JSC (which used
to be one of my accounts) to find out how to *task*
the "underworked" folks on those vehicles :). But no
luck.
From the perspective of someone in orbit, you
would suddenly see a line of geosats flare in the
nightime side of the sky - perhaps sequentially - from
east to west and then they would all disappear again.
The declination of these objects would decrease
slightly as you go through an ascending node pass and
increase slightly in declination as you would go
through a descending pass. And there would be two
separate groups of flaring geosats - those west of the
earth's shadow (the first set to be seen flaring) and
then those east of the earth's shadow. And you could
easily see what would appear to be 5 to 10 flaring
geosats in the few minutes you have to see this effect
from an orbiting spacecraft. In a lot of ways, it
would be an ideal place to observe this cool
phenomena.
Regards,
Jeff Umbarger
Plano, TX USA
--- Markus Mehring <m.m@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Rick Linnehan reported seeing satellites during EVA
> #3 - I must have
> missed that, maybe the Flight Day Highlights replay
> has it.
>
> As Bill Harwood (*) writes:
>
> >"I think I just maybe saw the Southern Cross... and
> definitely a
> >satellite fly over," Linnehan said at one point.
> "Three satellites.
> >Wow!"
>
> Wonder if that's "three satellites" as in "NOSS"...
>
>
> (*)
>
http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/current.html
>
>
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