Derek Breit performed a successful planar search last night for Ofeq 11 (16056A / 41759). This morning, Cees Bassa reported a small set of accurate reductions from Derek's video before I could produce my first less accurate result, so I decided to suspend my efforts and use his results to revise the search elements. The following are derived from the identically numbered search TLEs that I posted early on 2016 Sep 21 UTC. Their epoch's span the earliest and probably latest apogee of the perigee-raising manoeuvre of Sep 18 UTC. The analyses employ a synthetic observation generated from the original TLE at epoch, as well as Derek's observations. Only inclination, RAAN, eccentricity, mean anomaly and mean motion were permitted to vary. Eccentricity was constrained to hold apogee constant. Ofeq 11 386 X 604 km 1 77779U 77779A 16262.60334493 .00091223 00000-0 25000-2 0 02 2 77779 141.8520 327.6739 0159145 74.9568 182.1746 15.24507119 05 Arc 20160918.6-0924.14 WRMS resid 0.027 totl 0.009 xtrk Ofeq 11 382 X 604 km 1 77777U 77777A 16262.14637733 .00093953 00000-0 25000-2 0 02 2 77777 141.9581 325.4435 0161478 71.2254 181.1514 15.25030193 00 Arc 20160918.15-0924.14 WRMS resid 0.020 totl 0.007 xtrk Tonight, the difference in predicted time and track between the TLEs is not large, so the observational task should be less a search and more a confirmation of the orbit. If it can be observed a few more times before it manoeuvres again, then precise elements can be determined. Ted Molczan _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Sat Sep 24 2016 - 10:29:43 UTC
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