Paul J Henney reported: > Just back in from spotting a slow moving flasher , passing through the > "paws" of Ursa Major heading SSE to NNW at about 22 : 05 UT +/- 2 > minutes. Flashed up to mag 1 then down to inv. for about 10 > seconds then back up to mag 1 with a short brighter glint. > Then faded into inv. > > Using the bwgs.tle file I've tentatively ID'ed this as 87-006A The direction of travel reveals a retrograde orbit, i.e. inclination greater than 90 deg. 87006A is in a 74 deg inclination orbit, so it must be ruled out. Paul did not specify back or front paws, so I ran IDSat against the approximate central co-ordinates of both, and found a good match, which happened to pass through both: ERS-1 3.5 2.0 2.0 5.0 v 25.7 1 21574U 91050A 02121.81971227 .00000436 00000-0 16707-3 0 5361 2 21574 98.4727 196.5026 0033990 291.3258 68.4299 14.35048400564597 I have 88 of Russell Eberst's observations of this object on file, and in all but two, it was steady in brightness; however, both flashing points were observed on 2002 Mar 16. The period of variation was 10 s. It was steady in Russell's most recent obs of 2002 Apr 06, but the observation of recent flashing adds weight to the identification of the this object as the one seen by Paul. Finally, observers may wish to take note of the object's standard magnitude of 5.0, which I have just derived from Russell's observations. previously, the std mag had been estimated at 6.2, based on the object's dimensions. I obtained a virtually identical result for ERS-2, using the 56 of Russell's observations in my file: ERS-2 3.5 2.0 2.0 5.0 v 21.8 1 23560U 95021A 02122.40910120 -.00000642 00000-0 -22214-3 0 6453 2 23560 98.5501 197.2541 0001523 94.0301 266.1061 14.32234804367642 Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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