Cees Bassa wrote: > 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. On the RentryWatch mailing list, Joseph Remis has proposed that the re-entry was of the Falcon 9 rocket body 2014-052B / 40142. The object was last updated by USSTRATCOM on Dec 19 UTC, when it was in a 25.5 deg, 105 X 10706 km orbit. Joseph propagated it to this final orbit: 1 40142U 14052B 14362.14561576 9.99999999 50000+2 40735-2 0 00003 2 40142 25.4291 172.5189 0171354 315.6180 43.0211 16.36884005 2930 My effort to confirm this using Satevo yielded this result: 1 40142U 14052B 14362.16559196 6.00782537 38275 2 33684-2 0 90609 2 40142 25.4202 171.3074 0326827 317.6835 39.8403 15.89135640 2957 Both are in the ball-park of the sightings, but mine are somewhat late. Both bear a strong resemblance to your elements, Cees. This looks very promising. Ted Molczan _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Sun Dec 28 2014 - 17:19:42 UTC
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