USA 259 elements from observations

From: Ted Molczan via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 11:41:44 -0500
USSTRATCOM has catalogued the payload of NROL-35 as USA 259 (2014-081A / 40344). The Centaur has yet to appear in the
catalogue, and may never be listed, given the intention to de-orbit it on its first revolution.

Peter Wakelin has posted his first visual observations of the payload, spanning more than 7 h:

http://satobs.org/seesat/Dec-2014/0095.html

Off-list, Scott Tilley has shared for review, five observations he made near 2014 Dec 14 01:45 UTC, that fall within the
span of Peter's observations. My analysis of the combined set of observations yields the following solution:

USA 259                                               2101 X 37750 km
1 40344U 14081A   14348.24158565  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0    08
2 40344  62.8507 212.7154 6776416 266.7209  69.0062  2.03510246    02
Arc 20141213.94-1214.24 WRMS resid 0.005 totl 0.004 xtrk

Both data sets had small residuals, so there is reason to be confident in both. I will leave it to Scott to post his
observations to the list.

Ted Molczan


_______________________________________________
Seesat-l mailing list
http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
Received on Sun Dec 14 2014 - 10:42:31 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Sun Dec 14 2014 - 16:42:31 UTC