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 _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Wed Sep 17 2014 - 08:07:03 UTC
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