Russell Eberst has recovered USA 116 (95066A / 23728) after 224 days. Nice work! http://satobs.org/seesat/Apr-2006/0144.html Here are Russell's obs, extracted from his report above: SATOBS 2420 0604 0.211 1204 18 9506601 013937.89 034457+670047 2.0 2.0 0 S 9506601 014001.88 040036+590243 2.3 2.3 0 S 999 I offer this solution, which has WRMS residuals = 0.039 deg: 1 23728U 95066A 06108.05823466 .00001071 00000-0 54410-4 0 07 2 23728 97.8950 241.3734 0282919 49.5738 312.9790 14.88278489 03 I began with Mike McCants' latest elset: 1 23728U 95066A 05249.06868391 .00001700 00000-0 86728-4 0 05 2 23728 97.8648 18.4474 0285000 66.4251 293.5748 14.87800711 08 For the present rate of decay, I used the value that caused Mike's elset to closely predict Russell's obs, found by trial and error. The present inclination is consistent with an apparent increase in RAAN of about 0.4 deg relative to my drag-adjusted version of Mike's elset, revealed by a preliminary orbital analysis, correcting only RAAN and mean anomaly. Basically, I manually adjusted the drag-adjusted version of Mike's elset, until I found that a mean value of 97.88 deg closely predicted the new RAAN. Then I propagated to the present, and added double the difference (97.8648 + 2 * (97.88 - 97.9864) to estimate the present inclination. I also set the new arg perigee to agree with the inclination and drag-adjusted version of Mike's elset. Finally, I ran a correction on only RAAN and mean anomaly. Mean motion and decay remain a bit uncertain, but predictions should be fairly accurate. Ted Molczan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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