The planned orbit elements for a launch of the upcoming Atlantis flight on 6-SEP-06, 16:28:51 UTC have now been posted on spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/elements As we already have come to know about these data the TLEs for the Meco orbit arc are wrong. Try the following set instead: shuttle meco 1 0 06249.69450450 0.00000000 00000-0 95600-4 0 1 2 0 51.6337 128.0960 0127665 348.7535 72.2002 16.48582149 1 Using the also given state vector and numerical propagation I find the following coordinates for places in Europe where a solar transit of Atlantis and the ET might be visible (times in UTC): SEP 6 16:47:40 -7.82115 52.87206 SEP 6 16:47:45 -7.16436 52.83395 SEP 6 16:47:50 -6.50471 52.79268 SEP 6 16:47:55 -5.84205 52.74825 SEP 6 16:48:00 -5.17619 52.70063 SEP 6 16:48:05 -4.50695 52.64979 SEP 6 16:48:10 -3.83407 52.59573 SEP 6 16:48:15 -3.15732 52.53840 SEP 6 16:48:20 -2.47638 52.47777 SEP 6 16:48:25 -1.79093 52.41382 SEP 6 16:48:30 -1.10058 52.34651 SEP 6 16:48:35 -0.40490 52.27578 SEP 6 16:48:40 0.29660 52.20159 SEP 6 16:48:45 1.00259 52.12370 SEP 6 16:48:50 1.71736 52.04240 SEP 6 16:48:55 2.43991 51.95744 SEP 6 16:49:00 3.17111 51.86873 SEP 6 16:49:05 3.91197 51.77615 SEP 6 16:49:10 4.66368 51.67959 SEP 6 16:49:15 5.42763 51.57889 SEP 6 16:49:20 6.20551 51.47388 SEP 6 16:49:25 6.99933 51.36434 SEP 6 16:49:30 7.81153 51.24999 SEP 6 16:49:35 8.64517 51.13052 SEP 6 16:49:40 9.50403 51.00549 SEP 6 16:49:45 10.39300 50.87436 SEP 6 16:49:50 11.31849 50.73642 SEP 6 16:49:55 12.28915 50.59070 SEP 6 16:50:00 13.31712 50.43581 SEP 6 16:50:05 14.42027 50.26972 SEP 6 16:50:10 15.62668 50.08918 SEP 6 16:50:15 16.98423 49.88856 SEP 6 16:50:20 18.58222 49.65682 SEP 6 16:50:25 20.45028 49.38103 You have to be within 2 or 3 km of the central line over the British Isles so depending on how reliable the pre-launch orbit is your chances to see something are probably low. Once over Germany the conditions relax somewhat to +/-10 km so the chances would increase to see the transit. Let's hope for an on-time launch at long last and clear skies. Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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