Here's an interesting article from Philip Chien who I know monitors seesat-l. It helps explain why OIG has been slow (IMO) in putting out updated TLEs. And yes, I have strayed and gone and looked at the other side ;-)(hearsat-l which is for radio monitoring of sats) because the weather has been so bad this Winter in the NE U.S. The U.S. Government partial S/D has already resulted in a lot of space related information from not being disseminated on most NASA sites. Some additional non-NASA sites that might be used to obtain predicted and current STS TLEs would be: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~dcottle/ http://www.cts.com/browse/garym/elements Regards, Jeff Hunt <jhunt@eagle1.eaglenet.com> ---------------Original Message--------------- Ken McCaughey - N3FZX said: >Updated elements for SPRE and STS-72 will be available from the SPRE FTP >site as we get them from NASA. >URL ftp://w3eax.umd.edu/pub/spre/info With the federal government shutdown it make take more time for elements to get distributed than normal. Satellite tracking is still considered a critical government function, but is operating with minimal personnel. In addition many folks who normally help distribute elements are not able to access their E-mail and other resources. There is a good trick to tracking a spacecraft, like Spartan, which is deployed and retrieved by the shuttle. Just use the latest available keps for the shuttle before it deploys the Spartan spacecraft. Remember that Spartan has no onboard propulsion system which would move it in to a different orbit - just extremely small cold gas thrusters which are used for attitude control. So the Spartan remains in the orbit the shuttle leaves it in. Then the shuttle maneuvers in to a slightly different orbit, eventually ending up at a stationkeeping position about 40 nm away from Spartan, and then the shuttle begins a set of maneuvers to rendezvous with Spartan, ultimately ending up in the same orbit where Spartan was originally released! On previous Spartan and SPAS missions I have tracked the predicted location where the shuttle would catch up with the free-flyer very accurately using the pre-release keps for the shuttle. It's also important to note that 40 nm. is a fairly small distance in terms of orbital dynamics - while the two spacecraft will appear as separate dots visually, only the narrowest beams will care about which target it is pointed towards. *sigh* - I really hope the government is back up to speed by the time the shuttle launches. This shutdown is a real pain in the modem! Philip Chien, Earth News - space writer and consultant PCHIEN@IDS.NET --------------snip-snip signature, End of Original Message----------