On Fri, 11 May 2001, Harro Zimmer wrote:
> 1985-105A (#16235) Cosmos 1701
> OIG showed today (UTC) the decay of Cosmos 1701. SPACECOM hasn't issued any
> TIP message. There are five peculiar ELSET'S for these three days:
> May 05 Mean Motion: 6.344... Eccentricity: 0.4762...
> May 07 " " 7.213... " 0.4217...
> May 10 " " 15.829... !! " 0.0371... !!
> I don't see a "normal" explanation for this big jump between May 07 and
> May 10. It looks like a "catastrophic" event.
> The perigee altitude on the last epoch time - 1130.5628... - was 80.60 km.
> Based on the last two ELSET'S MPM + REENTRY delivers the decay on
> 10 May, 13:54 UTC +/- 17 minutes (28.11°S, 353.90°E)
> on a descending pass over the South Atlantic. It is also possible that the
> satellite survived for another rev. OIG reported:" Decayed 2001/05/11"
It is possible that the differing element sets might relate to different
objects because Cosmos 1701 suffered a break-up on April 29th.
It is interesting that NASA has been "spotting" the break-ups of
satellites decaying from Molniya-type orbits over the last year or
so. It seems likely that the satellites do suffer break-ups routinely
during the final stages of orbital decay as aerodynamic forces cause
attachments like solar panels and instrument shields to fragment during
the low perigee passes.
Phillip Clark
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Phillip S Clark 22 Winterbourne Close
Molniya Space Consultancy Hastings
Compiler/Publisher, Worldwide Satellite Launches E Sussex TN34 1XG
U.K.
Specialist in "space archeology" - the older and more obscure the more
interesting it is !
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri May 11 2001 - 13:35:22 PDT