Re: CLIO satellite launch on Sept 16

From: C. Bassa via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 15:06:10 +0200
It turns out my assumption that the second burn of the Centaur upper
stage would occur at apogee and would circularize the orbit was wrong.
The launch broadcast showed orbital elements at MECO-1, which
indicated a 176x28865 km orbit with a 27.91 deg inclination.

Given that information, and the times and latitude, longitude of the
MECO-1 and MES-2, it is possible to constrain the orbit and determine
the argument of perigee, mean anomaly and RA of the ascending node.

With that approach I get the following elset:
1 82305U 14999A   14260.12353009  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0    09
2 82305  27.9102 166.2048 6863818 159.8644 107.8839  2.87429999    00

The ground trace of this orbit between MECO-1 and MES-2 matches that
of the mission booklet quite well, so I am confident that this orbit
is reasonably accurate. This puts the payload at an altitude of 24800
km at the MES-2 burn, well before it would reach apogee.

Regards,
    Cees
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Received on Wed Sep 17 2014 - 08:07:03 UTC

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