Roy Tucker MPC station 683, situated near Tucson, AZ, found a slow moving satellite on april 13, 6h UT I couldnt match it with any known satellite. Given that there were 6 observations over 48 minutes Bill Gray of Project Pluto worked out an orbit and has created a psuedo MPEC page at http://home.gwi.net/~pluto/mpecs/v00278.htm Looking back thru the RAE tables and the current SSR's the only likely similarity is the 1967 40 launch. This left a satellite ERS18 and a titan transtage in an orbit of similar shape , but higher inclination. The last TLE for these objects has epoch May 1968. The only current candidate just might be the SMART-1 satellite. Can anybody on the list extract positions of it around April 13, 6h UT from ESA. As this spacecraft is under ion motor thrust 7 hours either side of perigee , the osculating orbits published by ESA occasionally are not useful. The last elset on from OIG was day 322 of 2003. Tony Beresford ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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