Re: Drag surface variation of Tiangong-1 SOLVED

From: Allen Thomson via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2018 22:37:54 +0000 (UTC)
> I used Humanity Star (which reentered today, 22 March, near 13:15 UT). Humanity Star is very useful because it was in a low orbit too and most notably it wassemi-globular, so we know it has no surface area variation. Any periodic drag


variation shown by Humanity Star should therefore be atmospheric in origin.
FWIW, Celestrak carries a group of TLEs called "Radar Calibration" which has a number of near-spherical satellites that might also be useful for investigating what the atmosphere is doing on the short term. I believe that there are some other roundish satellites, but it's been a long time since I looked into such matters and don't remember which ones they are.


https://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/radar.txt

   
_______________________________________________
Seesat-l mailing list
http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
Received on Thu Mar 22 2018 - 17:39:55 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Thu Mar 22 2018 - 22:39:55 UTC