USA 129 appears to have manoeuvred early on 5 May 2000 UTC. I have not had time to perform a through analysis, but it appears that the apogee was lowered by about 1.5 km, which decreased the orbital period by about 0.94 s. Coming so close after major manoeuvres by USA 129 and sister spacecraft USA 116, I speculate that this small manoeuvre was intended to fine-tune the synchronisation between the two. An alternative speculation is that perhaps USA 129 needed to manoeuvre to avoid collision with another object. I have not checked that, but it should not be very difficult to do with the available software. Here is my best estimate of the current orbit, based on observations by Russell Eberst and Mike Waterman, between 5 and 9 May UTC: 1 24680U 96072A 00130.88160880 .00021086 00000-0 30083-3 0 04 2 24680 97.9002 194.5027 0514477 105.0203 260.8524 14.74496207 07 Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 11 2000 - 19:08:54 PDT