Pierre Neirinck produced these elements, using observations by himself, Russell Eberst, Ted Molczan, Alberto Rango and Rainer Kracht, from 10 - 15 April UTC: USA 129 15.0 3.0 0.0 5.1 v 1 24680U 96072A 00106.38875050 .00045957 00000-0 62437-3 0 4357 2 24680 97.8705 170.3117 0473539 182.8324 176.6474 14.84078029 05 Using only the observations from 12 - 15 April UTC, I obtained: 1 24680U 96072A 00106.11909144 .00035368 00000-0 50708-3 0 01 2 24680 97.8745 170.0603 0468669 185.3864 174.2195 14.84030945 00 For practical purposes (predicting tonight's passes), both elsets are equally reliable. Both have mean residuals of about 1 arc min. The differences in decay rate and mean motion most likely are due to differences in atmospheric drag between the data sets used for the differential correction. Drag has been declining in recent days, so my elset, which is based on a later data set, would be expected to have a lower decay rate. 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 15 2000 - 09:15:44 PDT