Re: Withholding elements - was Re[2]: SeeSat and Kosovo
Kevin Fetter (kfetter@geocities.com)
Fri, 02 Apr 1999 07:00:39 -0500
>I won't go to any particular effort to see the Canadian Radarsat satellite
>- that's no big deal. But I will go to the effort to see the Lacrosse
>satellites because it's more interesting to find something which took the
>efforts of the amateur community to track.
That's right my contry's radarsat is no big deal, so what if the new
radarsat will have 3 meter resolution. The information will be available to
anyone to get, unless the usa and canada strike a deal to prevent certain
picture's from being released. When there was the great floods that happen
in part of the usa and canada, the data from radarsat came in handy for
flood predictions. I think country's that don't have they own spy
satellite's will wan't to obtain pictures of the usa. It not like the
russian's don't know where the usa military bases are, and have pictures of
them. There is a lot of scientific data to be obtain from radarst, and I am
glad it will be available to any country, unless there is some deal to
prevent it.
>As far as GPS is concerned, I'm not absolutely sure but I believe it would
>be possible - using completely civilian code to download the ephemeris
>table from the satellites and use it to generate extremely accurate
>elements on a PC class computer. I suspect some of the amateurs who have
>built GPS equipment (i.e. Totally Acurate Clock) would be able to do it
>fairly easily.
>
A lot of country's produce precise ephemerides for the gps satellite's. The
only problem is that it seems that the files contain only the position
vector, but don't inclued the volocity vector. Don't you need both vector's
in order to generate a tle using the vec2tle program.
>
>Philip Chien, KC4YER
>Earth News
>world (in)famous writer, science fiction fan, ham radio operator,
>all-around nice guy, etc.
>
>
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