Early on February 6 (about 3:07 EST or 8:07 UTC) Svend wrote: >Watched a red, very red object to the NNE of my >location from 11pm-11:12apx began at 11 at apx 30 >degrees altitude and ended at 80 degrees. ( 38.7061°N, >121.3150°W) >Local Time: Pacific Standard Time (GMT - 8:00) > >my location in northern california. > >the object was very red and had a plume (this was the >red presumably) as it ascended I distinctly observed >the object split two times. The part of the missile >that dropped off moved south very rapidly then >dissapeared both times. The main part of this unknown >missile after each split dimmed and then brightened >again. Well, I found an interesting event that is pretty near in time and date, at least. That night a Terrier Black Brant (also known as Black Brant IX) sounding rocket was launched from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and the mission date and time are given as Feb 6, 7:30 Zulu (23:30 Feb 5 PST). The payload was to "map a quarter of the sky in four wavelength bands using the NUVIEWS sounding rocket experiment". http://www.wff.nasa.gov/~code810/pages/launched_missions.html http://wwr.wff.nasa.gov/~code810/news/current_news.html That rocket configuration has an altitude range of 150 to over 300 km. http://www.nsroc.com/front/stable/rockets/bbix.html Of course even that is way too low, plus the direction is wrong, to match the above description, but it seemed an interesting coincidence. The observer's site is in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe, Calif. Kistler didn't launch something big from the Nevada Test Site that night, did they? (Just kidding.) BTW, there are night launches scheduled for White Sands ("WS") in April, May, and September of 2003: http://www.wff.nasa.gov/~code810/pages/srpo_monthly_sch.html (On that schedule, "WI" is Wallops Island, Virginia, and "FB" is Poker Flats, Alaska [near Fairbanks].) Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 18 2003 - 00:26:12 EST