Iridium 5 moved to non-operational orbit

From: Michael McCants (mmccants@jump.net)
Date: Thu Aug 16 2001 - 08:28:50 PDT

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    Iridium 5 is now in an orbit that seems to be for a "spare".

Operational orbit last week:

1 24795U 97020D   01221.08181883  .00000138  00000-0  42119-4 0  6752
2 24795  86.3972 218.7076 0002482  68.5537 291.5923 14.34217644223223

Sunday:

1 24795U 97020D   01223.65947647 -.00000482  00000-0 -14968-3 0  6782
2 24795  86.4496 217.5683 0005091  81.7248 278.4853 14.43142963223598

Latest elset from OIG:

1 24795U 97020D   01226.50230066 -.00000134 +00000-0 -45834-4 0 06836
2 24795 086.4489 216.3794 0004874 080.7818 279.3935 14.43143194224005

So, some time between 01/221 and 01/223 it was moved into a lower orbit.
The inclination was increased slightly so that it will stay in the
same plane with its higher mean motion.

The current spare to replace it would be Iridium 51.

Mike McCants

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    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 16 2001 - 08:28:47 PDT