Tristan writes... >I have a report of someone who lives in Ostend, Belgium who saw a satellite >moving from West to East in the Morning of October 3 at approximately 4h55m >UTC. > >He reported that the satellite was moving with a comet like tail behind and >it had a brightness of about 1 or 2. > >I believe that this was the beginning of the reentry of the GE-1A Proton >third stage(2000-59B). > >Can someone confirm this ? I can confirm that this object did, indeed, pass over Belgium at about this time. The appropriate published elset is.. GE-1A Proton r 155 x 118 km 1 26555U 00059B 00277.19025163 .33326542 00000-0 22311-3 0 104 2 26555 51.6002 343.0929 0028216 276.9486 82.9066 16.51034700 255 This orbit suggests that it should have emerged from eclipse near 51.3 N, 2.2 W, at ~04:57:30 UTC and reached 50.4 N, 3.9 E, one minute later. It would probably have been a spectacularly bright and fast-moving object but I do not think it should have been showing any re-entry phenomena, such as a tail. It was about 158 km above ground and quite close to its apogee point. 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 Oct 03 2000 - 16:00:41 PDT