Brazil Reentry seen from Cerro Paranal (Chile)

From: C. Bassa via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 00:02:51 +0100
The reentry was also observed by MASCOT, the all sky camera at Cerro
Paranal in Northern Chile where ESO has the VLT. The reentry trail is
visible on a single image of 90s duration with an exposure start time
of 2014-12-28T04:41:34UT. Cerro Paranal is at 24.6272S, 70.4047W and
2635m in elevation.

This is a screenshot of the image: https://db.tt/KWv9jvYo
A copy of the FITS file: https://db.tt/w3MKMPIo

To obtain a very rough estimate of the orbital trajectory I measured
positions by hand by comparing the starfield on the MASCOT image with
that of a skymap to obtain the following IOD positions:

99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044134000 99 25 0346000-112550 99 S
99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044147400 99 25 0513500-110100 99 S
99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044151900 99 25 0549500-095900 99 S
99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044153300 99 25 0602000-095800 99 S
99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044159000 99 25 0646300-084500 99 S
99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044207800 99 25 0752000-060900 99 S
99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044213400 99 25 0828500-050300 99 S
99999 14 862C   9001 E 20141228044227900 99 25 0934000-012200 99 S

As the image has no time information on the trail except for the start
time of the exposure, I have used the exposure start for the first
measurement and manually/iteratively adjusted the timestamps of each
consecutive measurement by fitting a 200 km circular orbit (16.2722
revs/day mean motion) to the observations fitting for mean anomaly,
ascending node and inclination. This approach should allow for
reasonable guesses of the orbital inclination and RA of the ascending
node, assuming a circular orbit. The resulting orbit has an
inclination of about 25 degrees.

1 99999U 14862C   14362.19593750  .00000000  00000-0  50000-4 0    03
2 99999  24.7924 171.4723 0001000   0.0000 284.7256 16.27220000    05
# 20141228.20-20141228.20, 8 measurements, 0.279 deg rms

Since the reentry trail passed over Cerro Paranal at 75 deg elevation,
the orbital inclination is not very sensitive to the precise altitude
of the trail, should it deviate from 200 km (or have a significant
eccentricity).

The estimated orbit passes very close to Santa Rita do Pardo where the
debris was found and confirms that debris belongs to the reentry trail
observed from Chile.

Regards,
   Cees
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Received on Sun Dec 28 2014 - 17:03:42 UTC

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