Oops ! I was so absorbed in the orbit determination of Greg's unknown that I missed Ted's find. Anyway, it is interesting to see that Greg's observation led (one more time) to an accurate elset compared to an official source, except the mean motion value betraying many manoeuvers. For punishment :) I summarize and translate the CNES press release pointed out by Kevin. "22 February 1986 : An Ariane rocket sent SPOT 1 in space. Built for a 3 year life, it worked 18 years and gave 2.7 millions earth pictures. With the current altitude of 800 km, SPOT 1 could stay in orbit around 200 years, as it is coming near the end of its operational life, the teams of the CNES CST (Centre Spatial de Toulouse) decided to lower the orbit perigee to 550 km before a final passivation, and so reduce its life to around 15 years. During year 2001, a solar panel showed a sudden degradation, loosing 1/9 of power production, fearing an impredictable evolution, CNES decided to stop all functions of the payload after applying international recommendations about space debris. 1000 seconds burns are planned everyday during about ten days. On November 17th, SPOT1 has been lowered by 14 km on a circular orbit to free the orbit used by SPOT 2, 4 & 5 and avoid collision risks. The day after, the flight software and the satellite configuration was adapted to the deorbitation process." T. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 21 2003 - 08:36:58 EST