I just joined your mailing list and here's my brief (well, maybe a bit lengthy...) "Hello" message. I am a Planetary Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. My job is with the Spacewatch project. We survey the sky looking for Near-Earth asteroids and in the process, we see a wide variety of objects in the sky, from stars and galaxies, to asteroids and meteors, to Earth orbiting satellites. If you've heard about the close approach of some little 10 meter boulder, it was most likely one of our observing team who discovered it. Occasionally, we find an object which clearly has a geocentric orbit after following it for several hours. For us, that is a disappointment since we are hunting for chunks of rock, a bit of an unidentified Earth orbiting satellite is not what we are after. One thing that we do not have at the moment is an angles only geocentric orbit determination program. We usually can tell if an object is on a geocentric orbit rather than a heliocentric one by its very Earth-like heliocentric orbit and how the residuals of the observations with that orbit behave. One of our discoveries that was definitely in a heliocentric orbit made the press back at the end of 1991, but may have been a man-made spacecraft. That object was called 1991 VG and we estimated that it was between 9 and 18 meters in diameter if it had a typical asteroidal albedo. I have specifically imaged a man-made object in November 1992 when I was able to observe the Galileo spacecraft as it made one of its Earth flybys along its way to Jupiter. As far as I know, it is the most distant observation of a man-made object ever made. It appeared as a stellar object of about magnitude V=22 while the spacecraft was just over 8 million kilometers from Earth at the time. You can see a mosaic of three images of the spacecraft by visiting "Selected Spacewatch images" on my home page (URL given in my signature below) or by going to http://www/lpl/arizona.edu/spacewatch/images.dir/galileo.11.28.gif Galileo is one of the faintest images moving downward in the sequence of 3 images from left to right ending up at about 3:30 or 4:00 from the brighter star near the center of the image. I've observed Earth orbiting satellites visually since I first got into Astronomy more than 20 years ago. I remember watching Skylab fly overhead around Christmas time 1973 and I saw Skylab within a couple of orbits of its re-entry in the summer of 1979. Last month, I also caught Mir and Atlantis in the morning a few hours after they undocked. Jim. ------------------------------------------------ Jim Scotti e-mail: jscotti@lpl.arizona.edu snail-mail: Lunar & Planetary Laboratory University of Arizona P.O. Box 210092 Tucson, AZ 85721-0092 USA Work phone: 520/621-2717 Home Page: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/ ------------------------------------------------