Re: HELP: Strange cloud back in April.

Tony Beresford (starman@camtech.net.au)
Fri, 10 Sep 1999 18:31:02 +0930

At 07:42 10/09/1999 , Aldo Loup wrote:

 Could it had been generated by a
>Titan 4 rocket (or its payload) launched on that day?. Or by an Ariane
>42 (or payload INSAT 2E) launched a few days earlier?. Were phenomena
>like this one observed before?.
Aldo, The Titan4/IUS launch left the payload in a geostationary transfer orbit
because the IUS second stage fired while still attached to the IUS first stage,
according to information posted to Seesat-L by Philip Chien.
So it seems unlikely that the reported observations are that launch. But if
they are I hope that the reports have got thru to the satellite controllers.
As it was a spy satellite launch, no information is publicly available
except that 4 components are catalogued. 

As Ron Lee has already implied, solid rocket ( like IUS ) are different
from liquid fuel firings. In a lot of solis rocket fuel mixtures, 10 to
30 percent of the fuel is aluminium, which results in aluminium oxide 
as a combustion product. This is more visible than the the result of
liuid fuel combustion

Bill Bradfield, a retired Rocket Engineer and Comet Hunter, ( 17),
observed such a cloud of al2O3 quite a few years ago, incedental to
a session of comet hunting. It was the injection into geostationary
orbit of a DSP satellite, deployed from the space shuttle some 
6 hours before. 
Tony Beresford
Cospar 8597 34.96S, 138.6333E)