Regarding Allen Thomson's comment to the Washington Post: > "If Senator Kerrey believes that amateurs are doing significant > harm to U.S. national security, he should wonder why the NRO has > spent many years and many, many billions of dollars building > systems that allow the national security to be damaged by a few > hobbyists working part time with $50 worth of WalMart equipment," > Thomson said." This reminds me of the few weeks during the spring of 1987 when I had permission to directly telephone US Space Command's orbital analysts, working at their consoles in Cheyenne Mountain, in order to obtain current elements of the rapidly decaying PAGEOS balloon fragment 66056CG / 13795. The analysts were courteous, but guarded. One of them seemed surprised that I could track satellites at all, and asked, "do you have sensors?" I laughed, and said, "well I never thought about them in that way, but I guess my binoculars and stop-watches qualify as sensors." As I recall, he said nothing in response. My WalMart sensors must have seemed pathetic compared to his Neiman Marcus sensors. Nevertheless, we more than held our own. Here are NORAD's final 66056CG elements: 1 13795U 66056CG 87107.95135050 .06756693 00000-0 17016 0 0 5610 2 13795 82.5347 82.5347 2467514 257.7783 73.9121 10.49797293140361 We managed to track the object several days longer than NORAD, mainly because we assigned it higher "tasking" than NORAD: 1 13795U 66056CG 87108.13906000 .18275499 00000-0 35111 0 0 09 2 13795 82.5388 168.5269 2448175 257.6410 65.6380 10.56916033 06 1 13795U 66056CG 87109.00000000 .15400000 00000-0 16613 0 0 02 2 13795 82.4800 168.1560 2360000 257.0400 132.4800 10.81291210 08 1 13795U 66056CG 87109.12344988 .16390000 00000-0 28733 0 0 06 2 13795 82.5511 168.0180 2254200 255.7120 280.7420 10.98067400 08 1 13795U 66056CG 87111.13289410 .46697310 00000-0 17878-2 0 06 2 13795 82.5960 166.8390 1567250 260.2180 144.8820 12.87716600 00 Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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