Re: acceleration of Kosmos 1867
Kurt Jonckheere (kjonckheere@unicall.be)
Fri, 17 May 1996 11:49:58 +0000
I wrote:
>87- 60 A = 18187 = Cosmos 1867
>93-06-29 LB almost S, mag 5
>93-10-17 TC S, mag +2.5, u
>94-05-11 TC S, mag +6.5
>96-05-15 KJ 8.0
>96-05-15 TC 8.30 AA, mag +3
>Started flashing!!
Tristan wrote:
>As I saw Kosmos 1867(87-60A/18187) flashing yesterday, I was curious to find
>something back in recent elements of this object.
Tristan indeed found back an jump in Mean Motion at the end of 1995.
>87060_A
>1 18187U 87060 A 95343.79661940 .00000034 00000-0 13186-4 0 3615
>2 18187 65.0049 252.6079 0012281 267.1725 92.7947 14.30093189439503
>87060_A
>1 18187U 87060 A 96 03.97149092 .00000282 00000-0 14748-3 0 3684
>2 18187 65.0037 182.2685 0013300 272.7740 87.1818 14.30105764443102
I just run my program and created a graph of the orbital elements
since May 1992.
It is very obvious that there were TWO jumps in Mean Motion during
the last years:
The first one happened between 94 Aug 18 and 22. Semi major axis
decreased suddenly from 7169.726 to 7169.623 km, a jump of
100 metres.
The second one is the one Tristan mentioned. It occured between
95 Dec 21 and 96 Jan 3. An decrease of 40 metres.
I cannot detect the date of the jump better because of lack of
orbital elements.
When I compare these jumps with those happening with rockets
the difference is that for a rocket it can take several days
or weeks for the elements to become stable again. For this rocket
there is a very sudden jump; before and afterwards the semi
major axis is very stable (slowly decreasing lineair).
As you can see from the PPAS-extract we have no observations in
our Database to conclude what jump caused it to accelerate and
how it accelerated. It would be very interesting to compare the
acceleration of a payload to a rocket! So keep on observing!
Latest elements:
1 18187U 87060 A 96137.11789093 .00000007 00000-0 27536-5 0 4103
2 18187 65.0080 170.2565 0016062 278.7097 81.2167 14.30107991462144
I asked Bjoern and Bart to make the graph available via the net.
Happy observing and... don't forget 96- 17 B too!!,
Kurt J
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Kurt Jonckheere (kjonckheere@unicall.be) 51.2 N 2.9 E
observations collector for the Belgian Working Group Satellites:
Send your observations of flashing satellites, preferrably in the correct
PPAS format to obs@physics.oxford.ac.uk or obs@physics.ox.ac.uk
I Dreamed I Dream -- Sonic Youth
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