The 2.3 min late arrival on 2003 Jan 04 at 12:51 UTC reported by Tony Beresford was unexpected, but plausible. I found no other candidate objects in the vicinity of the observation. If the object were to manoeuvre to an orbit more like those of the two eastern plane objects, then it would have to manoeuvre at perigee to lower its apogee, and manoeuvre at apogee to raise its perigee. If its apogee was lowered first, then, that would have caused the object to arrive earlier, until its perigee was raised. There are too many possible combinations of apogee-lowering and perigee-raising times to evaluate, so I have instead created several search orbits, that fit Tony's single point. The first assumes that only the apogee had been lowered: 1 70016U 03004.53525230 .00029109 00000-0 30000-3 0 06 2 70016 97.9000 69.8000 0411000 182.6069 137.3000 15.02500000 09 The others assume that both manoeuvres had been performed, and differ only in the mean motion and apogee height: 1 70017U 03004.53525231 .00005389 00000-0 30000-3 0 02 2 70017 97.9000 69.8000 0313000 182.6069 138.0000 14.81000000 00 1 70018U 03004.53525232 .00005389 00000-0 30000-3 0 04 2 70018 97.9000 69.8000 0324000 182.6069 137.9000 14.78500000 02 Of course, it would be wise to look for the object in the original orbit, just in case there was a problem with Tony's observation (I doubt it, but most of us have been fooled from time to time): 1 24680U 96072A 03003.53256872 .00029166 00000-0 33101-3 0 06 2 24680 97.8541 69.0038 0493681 185.8948 173.6324 14.83264394 06 Plotting all of the above should help to bracket the search. The object is unlikely to be much earlier than the 70016 orbit, and not much later than the 70018 orbit. On high elevation passes, the tracks will be far apart. Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jan 04 2003 - 14:48:17 EST