Luis Hermida in Uruguay has emailed with a report of which I believe to be of the re-entry of the ill-fated QuickBird 1 satellite and/or its Cosmos 3M rocket. He states that luminous phenomena were witnessed by several people from lat 35 deg S / long 56 deg W at 00:15 UTC on November 21. Two big luminous objects and several small ones were observed. The general direction, seemed to be S-N. The second of two elsets issued for QuickBird 1 is: QuickBird 1 610 x 78 km 1 26617U 00074A 00325.98147396 -.00001942 61402-5 00000-0 0 20 2 26617 65.7786 26.6793 0395802 357.8364 186.5166 15.75231226 06 Mike McCants's LATLONG program gives the following ground track: UTC Latitude Longitude 00:05 48.1 S 64.8 W 00:06 44.7 S 61.5 W 00:07 41.3 S 58.6 W 00:08 37.7 S 55.9 W 00:09 34.1 S 53.6 W 00:10 30.4 S 51.4 W 00:11 26.7 S 49.4 W 00:12 22.9 S 47.6 W 00:13 19.0 S 45.8 W 00:14 15.2 S 44.2 W 00:15 11.3 S 42.6 W Note that it should have reached its very low perigee when close to the following northbound equator crossing at 00:18 UTC near longitude 38.2 deg W, just NE of Brazil. The prediction is some 6 minutes early with respect to Luis's report, but the track and direction of motion are consistent and I surmise that the reported time may be late or that the object may have made a slightly lower and faster swoop around the Earth following its launch from Plesetsk at 23:00 UTC - perhaps a combination of both. Alan -- Alan Pickup / COSPAR 2707: 55d53m48.7s N 3d11m51.2s W 156m asl Edinburgh / SatEvo & elsets: http://www.wingar.demon.co.uk/satevo/ Scotland / Decay Watch: http://www.wingar.demon.co.uk/satevo/dkwatch/ * ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Tue Nov 21 2000 - 09:56:30 PST