New Geosync flasher discovered by Ed Cannon
Mike McCants (mikem@freeside.fc.net)
Sat, 28 Mar 1998 16:10:25 -0600 (CST)
Last night, March 27, 1998 just before 10PM CST, I turned my
8 inch telescope to look for Gorizont 23 about 30 degrees up
in the west-southwest and Ed Cannon spotted a flashing
satellite through my 12x80 finder scope. A subsequent timing
of the flashes gave 317 cycles in 796.1 seconds for a period
of 2.5114 seconds. The flashes were "strobe-like", similar
in character to Superbird A or Gorizont 23, but fainter.
The satellite flashed to about 6th or 7th magnitude. Many times
it alternated between one bright flash and a fainter flash, but
many times there were a series of fainter flashes. The stopwatch
was started for timing flashes at 03:57:08 Mar. 28 UT, so the
discovery was a few minutes before that time. At one point the
flashes became very faint for a while and then came back brighter
again. The flashes became very faint and died away about
04:30UT, so it was under observation for about 30 minutes.
At the beginning of the observations, Gorizont 23 was about 1 degree
away from this object. The two objects had almost the same
altitude, but Gorizont 23's azimuth was about 1 degree lower.
The altitude for both was about 30.5 degrees. At about 4:30,
Gorizont had drifted north and both objects were within the
same field on the 8 inch at 50x, about 0.6 degrees apart.
The azimuth for each was approximately 247.
The observations were made from Pedernales Falls State Park
where the Austin Astronomical Society is holding its semi-annual
Central Texas Start Party. The latitude and longitude are:
30.31 north, 98.26 west.
I have not been able to match any known object to the positional
observations.
30.3080 98.2580 900. Pedernales Falls State Park
Yr Mn Dy Hr Mn Sec R A Dec Epoch
98 3 28 4 7 31.1 6 23.35 -1.86 1950
98 3 28 4 8 3.8 6 23.97 -1.86 1950
98 3 28 4 9 19.2 6 25.25 -1.86 1950
98 3 28 4 30 5.6 6 45.95 -1.60 1950
The first 3 observations are "solid", but too close together in
time to determine much about the orbit. The last observation
is somewhat uncertain. The following geosynchronous elset
fits these observations:
Unknown
1 98001U 98 87.03759690 .00000000 00000-0 00000+0 0 01
2 98001 3.4900 54.0000 0000100 .0000 .0000 1.00270000 06
The (small) time difference between this elset and third observation
might indicate that the mean motion is close to 1.0000 instead of
the assumed 1.0027 given in the elset. This would make the object
about 1 degree farther west every day. I do not think that it is
possible that this might be an object in an eccentric orbit at
its apogee.
Of course Ed and I plan to try to recover the object tonight and
if we are successful, that will determine the mean motion with
a fair amount of accuracy.
Mike McCants
Austin, Tx