Hi All In a message to SeeSat recently Jonathan T Wojack asked >BTW, what is "WSRN"? that was mentioned in a message from Tony Beresford. I havent seen a reply from Tony on the subject of WSRN so will "jump in" with foot in mouth ! WSRN stood for Western Satellite Research Network that operated in the mid 1960's to early 70's and was comprised of about 50 amateur groups or individuals spread around the world but with by far the majority in the United States. It was funded by North American Rockwell Corporation. The main purpose of the group was to secure optical observations of artificial satellites and to locate lost satellites. Several publications were issued on the optical characteristics of many satellites. I here quote from the introduction to the report SD68-629 "Satellite Optical Characteristics Catalog (1965-1968) of July 20, 1968: "For the past ten years teams of the Western Satellite Research Network have undertaken an extensive program aimed at compiling and classifying satellite optical characteristics. In this the second optical charactersitics catalog 7900 observations of the optical characteristics of 574 satellites are compiled,reduced and presented in tabular form etc etc ..... " Most of the former WSRN observers have now passed onto higher pastures or disappeared from the tracking scene - I wonder how many members of SeeSat were part of WSRN?. I have a short list of the most active observers - taken from the introduction to the above publication - which gives " The contributions of the following individuals are particularly noteworthy: Michael McCants, Greg Roberts, Paul Maley, Dr.U.Guntzel-Linger, George Gruskos, Richard Reynolds, David Brierley, Horst Kohnke, Alan Stephenson and his team, Jim Williams and Donald Charles." Some of these names are still around today - Horst Kohnke,who was a very keen observer, infortunately passed away several years ago at a relatively young age. Im not too sure of exactly when WSRN ceased to operate - it was either in the very late 60's or very early 70's - guess they lost their funding. I hope this is of interest to readers. Best wishes, Greg ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 20 2001 - 09:00:21 PDT