My thanks to all for the comments on this, on and off list. As I mentioned previously, I'm working slightly outside my trade here; it's good to get some informed commentary. There are some excellent reasons for thinking the burn putting the object into heliocentric orbit would occur at perigee, foremost among them the fact that it takes _immensely_ less fuel to do so. I don't know if this hardware has anything even close to what it takes to put everything first into a GTO (well, more like transfer to a twelve-hour circular orbit like a GPS/GLONASS sat), then boost from apogee to get into heliocentric orbit. The general rule (true for everything I've seen thus far) is that you boost the object as much as possible as close to the earth as possible. Quite aside from that, as has been pointed out, an apogee burn would be in the wrong direction, putting you in the inner solar system. Unfortunately, we still don't really know where you'd point a telescope to find booster and payload. Best I'm hoping for, right now, is that we get TLEs for the semi-GTO orbit. Then we figure out: "if you were in that orbit and coming back to perigee, and applied some delta-V right at perigee, what would your resulting orbit be?" Since that boost will be on the daytime side of the earth, we'd then have to wait a bit and hope that somebody spots the booster and payload, fairly high up by the time they become visible, as they head off into the morning sky. It also could happen that one of the big asteroid surveys would just stumble across them (I doubt they'd do any deliberate targeting). They've done so, but not often. Much as rocks a few meters across can usually hit us without being spotted on the way in, artificial objects of similar size can usually reverse the process and go similarly unnoticed. Thanks! -- Bill _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Tue Feb 06 2018 - 09:31:50 UTC
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