IAE decay

Alan Pickup (alan@wingar.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 22 May 1996 17:45:38 +0100

I called the Inflatable Satellite the "IAP" yesterday after I picked up 
the acronym from another posting. Having since checked the Shuttle WWW 
pages, I now realise that I should have used "IAE" instead.

Bill Bard's latest Seesat-L posting says:
>The STS-77 CapCom just informed the STS-77 crew that the tethered
>satellite re-entered at about 5:30 AM EDT (0930 UTC) over the Atlantic.
If we take this to be a reference to the IAE, then the decay was at May 
22.396 - 0.016 day later than my (fortuitous!) prediction yesterday.

In fact, it was running 65s late against my final predicted element; the
corresponding OIG element is:
IAE
1 23872U 96032C   96143.35927604  .33369273  58942-5  57057-2 0   166
2 23872  39.0322 253.9177 0008701 300.5494  59.9587 16.31848780   399

Alan
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