I havent seen this on SeeSat ( maybe I missed it? ) but Im sure of interest if not seen earlier. Cheers greg ----- Original Message ----- From: Pierre NEIRINCK To: undisclosed-recipients: Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2012 1:23 PM Subject: Break-up of Telkom 3 Breeze-M R/B (#38746) .> Message du 20/10/12 04:05 > De : "Matson, Robert D." .Hi Pierre, You might let people know who are interested in such things that for the last 3 days I’ve been investigating a major satellite break-up with well-known astronomer Rob McNaught. The event occurred on 16 October when Rob, as part of his regular near-earth asteroid survey work, serendipitously observed dozens of fragments passing through his very narrow field of view telescope (Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia). Based on his astrometry, I positively identified the culprit as the Breeze-M R/B upper stage that was supposed to launch Telkom 3 and Express MD2 into GEO back in August (USSPACECOM #38746). Rob observed over 70 individual fragments moving in mostly parallel orbits that matched the location (to within 0.5 degrees cross-track), direction and velocity that #38746 ~should~ have had, except that most of the fragments showed up about 5 minutes early. A subsequent targeted search for #38746 one day later by Rob (cued by me) turned up nothing, adding confidence to the identification. Given that this Breeze-M rocket body was nearly full of fuel (it shut down after only a 7-second burn, stranding the two satellites in useless orbits), it is not that surprising that it would eventually explode. I’m still calculating when the break-up had to have occurred, but my suspicion is that Rob McNaught imaged the aftermath only a few hours after explosion. My guess is that it broke up near perigee due to the elevated aerodynamic stresses at that point in the orbit. Perigee occurs on a descending node in the northern hemisphere around 30 degrees latitude. Rob’s observation was close to 180 degrees away in mean anomaly (i.e. close to apogee on the ascending node). Surprisingly, USSPACECOM has not reported this breakup, nor has it cataloged any new fragments as a result of the breakup. Certainly McNaught has excellent data from which he and I will be able to construct dozens of TLEs for the brighter fragments, many of which are flashing at very high rates. Will let you know if there are any new developments. Have a good weekend! --Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20121021/9995c1f2/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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