Tuesday, Oct. 1 The SeeSat archive isn't responding at the moment, so I can't see if there's another response there already -- but I would bet there is. This was ETS 6 (US SpaceCom 23230, International ID 94-056A, also called Kiku 6). It is a well-known spectacular high-altitude flasher whose flash period is either 9.46 seconds, or twice that. It was supposed to go into geostationary orbit but did not make it due to the failure of a launch stage. So it is in an extremely eccentric orbit. It was around its apogee at the time of the observation, about 38,400 km. The range (distance from observer to satellite) was over 40,000 km. Here's a NASDA Web site about it: http://www.nasda.go.jp/projects/sat/ets6/index_e.html Here's a recent element set: ETS 6 1 23230U 94056A 02271.87175571 -.00000090 00000-0 10000-3 0 453 2 23230 11.5344 220.8294 5040432 289.0208 24.3015 1.67093785 49479 It repeats a very similar pass every three nights, due to it completing 1.67 orbits per day (five orbits in three days). Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA >-----Original Message----- >From: Sean Kirby [mailto:sekajeni@bigpond.com] >Sent: 29 September 2002 01:48 >To: Chris.Peat@heavens-above.com >Subject: Unusual object at RA 21hr58.7' Dec 16d52m at 22:59 AEST! > > >Dear Mr Peat, > >I am trying to establish the nature of an extremely >unusual object sighted last night. I work at a small >observatory near Laguna in Australia (roughly 151E 33S, >elevation ~300 metres) and we received a call last >night from a gentleman who claimed to have been looking >at an object flashing at 9 second intervals in Delphinus >for over the past two hours! ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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