On Friday evening I found the Milstar 5 Centaur rocket
(Object 27169, 2002 01B) in its expected place about 10:40 CDT
(Oct 22 at 03:40 UT). It was quite difficult with the 8 inch
at 45x since it was alt 27, azi 245, range 24000 miles.
It was flashing to about magnitude 11 and the moon had already
risen in the northeast. I asked Ed if he wanted to see it and
while he was watching it, he spotted an object moving slowly
from west to east. This object was interesting because it was
tumbling from about magnitude 8.5 to about 10.5 with a period
of about 30 seconds.
We were not sure if this could be an unknown object, so we
tracked it for about 30 minutes. During this time it became
clear that it was moving more slowly and getting fainter.
I have now determined which stars it passed near during the
25 minutes that we timed passages by stars. I have used elcor
to determine the following orbit:
Unknown 051022
1 99999U 05795A 05295.05501301 0.00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 00
2 99999 25.2895 149.7020 7033154 50.3185 297.6259 2.37788565 07
I hope that the mean motion may be accurate to within 5 minutes per day.
This gave the following predictions for the time of observation:
30.314 N 97.866 W Bee Caves Rsrch Ctr
2005 Oct 22 Fri evening/Sat morning Times are UT
Unknown 051022 IM 2.0
Mag Hrs Min Alt Azi Hgt Range R A Dec
(miles)
8.5 3 50 28.5 244.4 6108 7559 19 47.3 -5.2
8.5 3 55 31.3 239.8 6799 8158 20 11.1 -6.5
8.6 4 0 33.3 235.8 7468 8766 20 31.3 -7.7
8.6 4 5 34.7 232.3 8113 9372 20 48.7 -8.8
8.7 4 10 35.7 229.3 8736 9972 21 3.9 -9.7
8.8 4 15 36.4 226.7 9337 10560 21 17.2 -10.6
8.9 4 20 36.8 224.4 9916 11136 21 29.0 -11.4
Mike McCants
Austin, TX
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