Morning Derek Re LIGHTSAIL - as readers here should know Ted Molczan issued pre-launch elements for LIGHTSAIL. I used them to receive radio transmissions at 1904UT on the 20th May shortly after it was switched on. Then new elements were released ( by presumably the LIGHTSAIL owners) which showed that Teds elements were about 1 or 2 minutes out and I used these elements to track another pass by radio ( the satellite was in earths shadow at the time - I have not checked what the status is now since it is of no real interest to me), so PLANETARY.ORG appear to have issued at least one set of elements and probably more since the satellite did transmit for a few days before the software glitch crashed the on-board computer thus rendering the satellite silent and the satellite was tracked by several other people by radio before the silence . SPACETRACK have, and are, releasing elements for all ten ULTRASATS. I have seen them - I did not get them from SPACETRACK and I am not sure what the "secrecy" status is but assume that these elements for the ten ULTRASAT are available to the ULTRASAT owners. The problem is that neither SPACETRACK nor the ULTRASAT owners really know which object is which ULTRASAT and until they have dispersed in orbit - they were released more or less in a cluster so all closely spaced together - and the ULTRASATS start transmitting it is not that easy, if possible, to identify which is which. Optical tracking (at least by amateurs ) will not be able to resolve this issue as the objects are small and thus pretty faint - I could probably track them if I use the setup I use for GEOSATS - but will not be able to do no better than SPACETRACK - i.e track an object but not know which actual ULTRASAT is which, so until the ULTRASATS start transmitting - not all frequencies used are in the public domain - the identities cannot be determined. No doubt once this is done the elements will appear in the normal data released by SPACETRACK. As far as I know only one of the ULTRASATS is currently transmitting. I have been too busy with the OTV-4 mission to worry about these satellites and would not have normally bothered with them but I am thinking about doing some monitoring just to hear them for fun . I doubt that I will be trying any optical though - except possibly LIGHTSAIL IF the spacecraft computer can be re-booted and the mission completed. Cheers Greg _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Thu May 28 2015 - 23:51:32 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri May 29 2015 - 04:51:32 UTC