At 21:30 5/10/00 , Don Gardner wrote: >How does a 1962 launched Delta R/B - a "B" object - suddenly appear 38 years >later as a newly catalogued object with a 1970 epoch? >Designator CatNo Common Name Source LaunchDate >------------ ----- ------------------------- ------ ---------- >1962-051B 26558 DELTA 1 R/B US 1962/10/02 > >DELTA 1 R/B >1 26558U 62051B 70263.16288927 -.00000592 00000-0 00000+0 0 11 >2 26558 49.6824 326.4919 8496144 341.5264 1.5152 0.66173307 14 My copy of the RAE Tables of Earth satellites(57-86) indicates that both the payload(Explorer 14) and its rocket decayed before jan 1, 1987. It seems the RAE people thought it had only a 3 year life. The last orbital elements from 1964 have perigee of 2880Km, apogee 96000, inclination 42.7 degrees. In the last 30 years the sun and the Moon would have played havoc with an orbit like that, as one can show from THEs for the ASTRON satellite. The rocket is also the small third stage solid job used in those days, not the 2nd stage with which one is more familiar with these days. The RAE tables say it was 1.5m long and 0.46m diameter. It will be interesting to see if recent elements turnup or not. It just may not have decayed and new technology or new procedures have recovered it. Alternatively it might be the equivalent of "asteriod precovery" that is finding old images on asteroids, after the intial orbit allows one to calculate where it might have been. Tony Beresford ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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