I have just received word from the project that there seems to be a serious problem. After the planned first burn of the engine, the spacecraft was not found in the predicted orbit. Alternative radar observations preliminarily show that there are two objects in the orbit with parameters the same as before the planned engine burn. Observers are requested to attempt to discover the spacecraft in the initial LEO parking orbit. This is the official pre-launch estimated TLE of the LEO parking orbit: 1 55500U 11000A 11312.95486111 -.00010748 00000-0 -11606-4 0 14 2 55500 51.4279 0.6058 0106375 25.7555 298.8256 15.98414689 33 I imagine that one of the two objects seen on the radar could be the final stage of the booster. Accurate descriptions and counts of the number of objects seen, as well as position and time would be useful. Ted Molczan _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 09 2011 - 00:06:22 UTC