Satellites eclipsed Aug.11

Bjoern Gimle (b_gimle@algonet.se)
Sun, 1 Aug 1999 11:34:13 +0200

I have written a program to find all satellite positions (at fixed
intervals)
closer than a specified distance from the Sun-Moon eclipse line.
This version zero does not account for the width of the shadow cone, but
for a LEO on the sunlit part of the Earth it is just a few hundred km, so
it is still easy to find the candidates.

First trials with a 60 second interval, using recent SELECT.TLE and
VISUAL.TLE found:
01843 65106A   Cosmos 100     11:21 034E 43N !?
04813 70113A   Cosmos 389     10:18 000E 49N
07969 75056B   Cosmos 744 r   10:23 002W 49N
11285 79020A   InterCos 19    11:26 028E 38N
15076 84063E   SL-12 r (aux)  12:01 045E 35N
15945 85069B   Cosmos 1674 Rk 10:04 000E 46N
16609 86017A   Mir Complex    10:15 003E 45N
16496 86006B   Cosmos 1726 Rk 11:09 028E 42N
20466 90010B   Cosmos 2058 Rk 11:07 025E 42N 53 km! 11:06:27-11:07:40
22233 92079C   GPS 2-16 r2    10:55 018E 30N !?
25105 97082B   Iridium 24 tum 10:03 006W 46N        10:02:53-10:03:45
25680 99019E   Gstar45 Soyuz  11:13 028E 45N !?     11:14:52-11:15:20

Quality Assurance is minimal - I checked three passes with SkyMap, and it
shows
eclipse coloured tracks at the indicated times. But the presence of "!?"
indicates that I doubt some of the most Eastward positions, and the presence
of errors makes all output unreliable.


-- bjorn@tt-tech.se (office)  b_gimle@algonet.se (home)      --
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