This past night, Mike McCants wrote:
> Ed Cannon and I have been watching the three main objects for the last
> few nights. Based on slightly different brightnesses, I believe that
> the original elset for Payload A was for the Hai Yang 1 and for
> Payload B was for Feng Yun 1D.
< ... stuff deleted ... >
> The Long March (27432) is tumbling with a period of about 0.54 seconds.
> It is bright and spectacular. The elsets for 27431 and 27432 have
> been consistent.
>
> There were no new elsets for 27433 for a couple of days. I was unable
> to find an object at the location of the old elset. Last night I was
> able to observe a relatively faint (magnitude 7 or so in strong moonlight)
> object (at 3:13UT May 23) that matches the 14.224 elsets:
>
> So it is certainly possible that this piece of debris has a small enough
> mass that it could have a high drag like this. This is a "non-standard"
> elset since the perigee plus mean anomaly does not add up to about 360
> degrees.
>
> It is possible that there is another debris object here?
We too have been following these objects (observations below) and it looks
like they all merit watching- the rocket for its entertainment value and
the others to try to pin down the identifications.
Clear and dark skies!
Ed Light
Lakewood, NJ, USA
N 40.107, W 074.231, +24m
Our data ...
UTC Date/Time NCAT V IM SM
------------------ ----- --- ---- ----
2002 05 16/01:18.9 27430 4.0 +3.7 +4.7
2002 05 17/01:10.2 27430 5.8 +5.5 +6.3
2002 05 17/01:10.8 27430 4.9 +4.3 +5.3
2002 05 16/01:19.1 27431 4.0 +3.7 +4.7
2002 05 17/01:10.4 27431 5.2 +4.9 +6.0
2002 05 17/01:10.6 27431 4.7 +4.4 +5.5
2002 05 17/01:11.1 27431 4.9 +4.3 +5.3
2002 05 16/01:14.6 27432 3.5 +3.2 +4.3
2002 05 16/01:15.2 27432 3.5 +2.9 +3.8
2002 05 17/01:01.1 27432 3.1 +2.7 +3.9
2002 05 17/01:02.5 27432 4.0 +3.4 +4.5
2002 05 23/01:26.8 27432 5.1 +4.6 +5.1
2002 05 23/01:27.8 27432 5.2 +4.3 +4.9
2002 05 24/01:14.8 27432 3.5 +2.9 +3.8
2002 05 16/01:18.5 27433 6.5 +6.2 +7.2
2002 05 17/01:09.2 27433 6.0 +5.7 +6.8
Notes:
(1) All brightness estimates were made with 7x50 and 10x50 binoculars
using conveniently near comparison stars.
(2) The values for the rapidly tumbling rocket (27432) are the maxima.
(3) "V" = Observed apparent magnitude (+/- a few tenths)
(4) "IM" = Quicksat "intrinsic" magnitude (full phase, 1000 km range)
(5) "SM" = Skymap "standard" magnitude (half phase, Lambert law, 1000 km range)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri May 24 2002 - 11:38:04 EDT