s.stabroth@tu-bs.de ("Sebastian Stabroth") writes: > > If a drag factor is too high, the object will arrive late. > Hmm, it should exactly be the opposite in orbital motions. If an object > loses height > because of high drag, it travels faster and arrives sooner at your point of > observation. Thanks for your comment. We are saying the same thing. Let me restate what I said. If a drag factor in an elset is higher than the true drag experienced by the object traveling through the upper atmosphere, then if the observer looks for the object based on an ephemeris generated by a propagator using the elset, then the observer will see the object later than expected. (Observers recognize this as a common experience). -or- The higher the drag, the EARLIER the object will appear. I capitalize EARLY and its inflected forms to warn the observer of a potential conflict with the old aphorism: If you are a minute early, you will see it. If you are a minute late, you won't. For this reason, when I generate indications of visibility, I lean toward elsets with high drag factors. Someone else will have to write the 8 or 10 paragraphs needed to explain the ambiguities, abstractions, idioms, vagaries of the English language, and other subtleties which bring us here. Cheers. Walter Nissen ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Thu Aug 23 2001 - 15:05:03 PDT