Re: Landsat 9 Centaur stage deorbit burn observed! Wow!

From: C. Bassa via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2021 00:58:08 +0200
On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 12:04 AM Marco Langbroek via Seesat-l
<seesat-l_at_satobs.org> wrote:
> Many thanks to Cees for the heads-up!

And thanks to you for sharing it with others on twitter. It seems
quite a few people saw it, both thanks to your tweet, but also by
chance.

I'm very glad I took the time to study the mission overview brochure.
The cube sats that were deployed in a slightly different orbit
compared to Landsat 9 increased the mission duration long enough to
place the de-orbit burn and fuel dump over Europe, and fortunately at
a time of day and time of year where a part of the track was in
sunlight.

Observing a fuel dump has been an item on my satellite tracking bucket
list for quite a while, but Europe isn't that well placed with respect
to the popular launch sites, so it's been a long wait.

By chance I had my camera pointed in roughly the right direction to
catch the fuel dump as it exited the shadow. This image shows the
quite dramatic change in color as the sun rises as seen from the upper
stage: https://twitter.com/cgbassa/status/1442615380359450626

That thread also shows one of the final images of the fuel cloud
setting below the horizon.

Regards,
   Cees
_______________________________________________
Seesat-l mailing list
http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
Received on Mon Sep 27 2021 - 17:59:13 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Mon Sep 27 2021 - 22:59:13 UTC