On Monday 07 February 2011 18:55, Ted Molczan wrote: > It has been brought to my attention that publication of TLEs of Germany's > Sar Lupe satellites ceased after 2011 Jan 31. > > 2006-060A 29658 Sar Lupe 1 > 2007-030A 31797 Sar Lupe 2 > 2007-053A 32283 Sar Lupe 3 > 2008-014A 32750 Sar Lupe 4 > 2008-036A 33244 Sar Lupe 5 > That's bad news. Europe is setting up its own space surveillance network at the moment. Both Germany and France are major stakeholders and both have now requested USSTRATCOM to keep their military satellites classified. Should the new European space surveillance network ever decide to publish orbit elements for everyone on the Internet (I don't think there has been a decision about it yet) we can assume that there will be no classified sats present in their list as well. Satellite operators need to know where all the objects are in order to avoid collisions. I can't see any major military advantage of keeping orbits classified (also those of dead sats and debris which cannot be controlled anymore!). Well I guess it's five more sats for us to literally keep an eye out! Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 07 2011 - 18:24:21 UTC