Bob Christy has made Doppler radio observations of what must be the payload of NROL-41, called USA 215 (10046A / 37162). He shared with me the following times of closest approach of an UNID, broadcasting a strong signal on SGLS Channel 9, on three consecutive passes: Date UTC Sep 21 21:43:20 +/-10s Sep 21 23:25:50 +/-15s Sep 22 01:08:05 +/-15s The first of the above happened to be in the vicinity of my 77003 and 77004 search elsets, but the subsequent passes revealed that the orbit was higher than any of my search elements. I have adjusted my search elements to fit Bob's data, with the following result: FIA Radar 1 1071 X 1086 km 1 77007U 10265.02987126 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 03 2 77007 123.0000 98.5010 0010000 1.1879 358.9108 13.48102018 01 Arc 20100921.9-0922.05 WRMS resid 0.763 totl 0.515 xtrk I believe they should be sufficient to find it optically. Time should be accurate to well under one minute, but track error of 1 deg or more is possible, especially at high elevation. It will make several more visible passes of North America tonight (evening and morning window). Ted Molczan _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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