There was some confusion produced by SPACECOM. The object 1978-026C( #10704) named also today Delta 1 R/B was the real rocket body only until January 28, 1981. On this day the object exploded and delivered 209 pieces. A lot of them are decayed over the years. Now #10704 is a very small piece of debris with a RCS of only 0.02 m². This object is in orbit. The last released ELSET has the epoch 01289.318... and a MM of 13.869... . It is far away from decay. As Bjoern Gimle has mentioned that 1978-026AS looks like another player within this confusion. My analysis shows that some days ago SPACECOM had erroneously mixed the #10704 ELSETs with the data for 1978-026AS (#12201), a larger piece with a RSC of 7.88 m². The last released ELSET shows an epoch of 01288.204... and a MM of 16.265... My raw estimate based on the last five ELSETs 01285.513... - 01288.204... with a big gap between the last two delivers the decay on 15 October, 14:39 UTC +/- 88 minutes (34.6°S, 20.7°E) on a descending pass over South Africa. Harro Harro.Zimmer@t-online.de Berlin, Germany ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 16 2001 - 16:03:23 EDT