[Chaos-l] [Medoc-mountain-men] last night

[Robert Nielsen]

Well, AMC-14 is in an odd orbit.  It was launched on a failed Proton rocket, then slowly coaxed into an orbit by the DOD after they bought it from the telecommunications company that originally owned it.   Who knows, perhaps it is at a higher orbit.

Robert

On Sep 23, 2012, at 1:46 PM, Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 23 Sep 2012, Robert Nielsen wrote:
> 
>> And I just looked at my planetarium program (SkySafari) and looked at what was near that point in the sky at that time last Friday night.
>> 
>> The geosynchronous orbit for satellites isn't very far from there, just a little higher in the sky (between Albali and Sadalsuud or Beta Aquarii).  So if one had malfunctioned and moved slightly, it could have appeared in that area.  But there were also some satellites that were supposed to be in that area itself (MSAT M1 and LES 9 or perhaps INMARSAT 4-F3 or ICO G1). Given your description, it was moving the right way, from Albali towards Deneb Algedi.  So I'm pretty sure it was either a functioning satellite, or a piece of one.
>> 
>> In fact, if I had to pick a particular satellite that matches your description, I would pick AMC-14.  But there are lots of them in the general area.
> 
> I don't think it can be in a geosynchronous orbit like the ones you mention are, because while it is in the right plane it was moving too slowly against the background stars. Geosynchronous sattellites by definition move at 15 degrees/hour, the same as the rotation rate of the earth, but this sattellite appeared to me to move only 3-4 degrees in the 45 minutes that I was looking at it. Granted my timing measurement was very imprecise, so I can believe it was as fast as 7.75 degrees/hour, the rate that it would move if it was near the apogee of a GTO orbit (an orbit with apogee at the altitude of geosynchronous orbits and perigee close to the earth's surface); in this case it could be a discarded booster stage from a launch to geosynchronous orbit that was made before disposal of the booster became mandatory. I found an interesting set of slides about boosters like that here:
> 
> http://www.congrex.nl/11c01proceedings/Papers/2168175%20Finkleman.pdf
> 
> But my gut feeling is that my timing wasn't _that_ wrong, which means the apogee has to be higher than geosynchronous orbit (about 51000km as compared to the 42000km apogee of GEO/GTO). I don't know of any satellites that are intentionally launched that high.
> 
>            Alexey
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