Philip Chien said: >The only Titan dog-leg I know of from the Cape was the NOSS cluster >launched on June 8, 1990. From the launch time and the resulting >inclination it was clear that a dog-leg was performed at some point in >the trajectory. What's interesting is the initial in-orbit inclination >was about 50 degrees, a fairly easy inclination to reach from the Cape >without any dogleg maneuver, simply by launching at the appropriate >time. The satellites were eventually spotted in 63 degree orbits, the >nominal inclination for NOSS. I'm not sure I would call that a dog-leg. My definition of a dog-leg is a major plane change (> 0.5 deg?) occuring during initial powered flight. It sounds like it could have occurred after initial orbit was obtained and perhaps accomplished by the payload. If that is a dog-leg, then all geosats do dog-legs. As for going to an initial 50 deg inc and then 63 deg, a reason that comes to mind is to release some other payload at 50 deg inc (or lower) on the same flight. Bill