I'm doing some work on my orbital element archives and would like to put out a request for TLEs in the 8xxxx range. As has been discussed here on occasion, NORAD uses these numbers for "analyst elements" that are assigned to "uncorrelated targets" (UCTs). AFAIK, these are not presently distributed in public channels, but for a number of years in the mid-1990s fairly large numbers of 8xxxx elsets were released, for reasons that are slightly unclear. Studying my current holdings (about 17,000 UCT TLEs), I've found several interesting objects as well as some puzzles perhaps related to NORAD procedures. Which, of course, motivates me to collect more of these TLEs and see what else might be discovered in them. So if anybody here happens to have 8xxxx series TLEs stored in some corner of their disk drive, I'd much appreciate getting a copy by e-mail. Of course, if anyone wants a copy of my holdings, just ask. One particular object of interest, BTW, is 81214, which during October and November of 1994 was observed to have a much smaller radar cross-section than its optical brightness suggested. That was well within the period of public access to UCT data, so I'm hoping there are some TLEs around that might help identify what it was. See http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/at_951011.htm for what is currently known about 81214. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 27 2001 - 09:34:28 PDT