Hello everybody, On Friday night, Sept. 21, 21:00 EDT (Sept. 22, 01:00 UT) mission Kodiak Star will launch from Kodiak island in Alaska. The launcher is an Athena I three stage rocket (2 stages + Orbit Adjust Module) and the payload is made of four satellites. The primary payload is the NASA sponsored Starshine 3 student tracked atmospheric research satellite. I've worked many hours on the construction of this satellite and I'm surely looking forward to its launch. It is an aluminum sphere painted in black, 94 cm in diameter, 90 kg mass, and covered with 1500 aluminum mirrors 2,5 cm in dia., seven solar cell clusters and 31 laser retroreflectors. The sunlight reflected off these mirrors will produce flashes that will be seen naked eye ( http://www.azinet.com/starshine/ ) The other satellites are the DoD sponsored PICOSat, SAPPHIRE and PCSat. They will be too small to be seen naked eye and may be too faint for binoculars too. The mission profile is quite unique as the OAM will first reach an altitude of 800 km, release PICOSat at T+ 01h 03m 50s, SAPPHIRE at T+ 01h 09m 38s and PCSat at T+ 01h 10m 37s (all times approximate) while cruising off the african east coast. The stage will then descend to 500 km altitude and release Starshine 3 over the South Pacific at T+ 02h 08m 21s. Following the release, the OAM will distance itself from the satellite and make an evasive burn to fuel depletion over central Africa. For a ground track of the first two orbits : http://www.obsat.com/images/star3tra.jpg But the launch is likely to be delayed for maybe two days because of bad weather. Chances for a launch on Friday are only at 20 %. They rise to 30 % on Saturday, but 70 % on Sunday. Just in case, I've produced TLEs for the three days assuming a launch at the opening of the window that lasts from 01:00 to 03:00 UT on each day : Launch on Sept. 21 : STARSHINE 3 1 90001U 01043D 01265.13079115 .00001694 00000-0 54654-4 0 11 2 90001 67.0499 85.6229 0005594 254.2442 326.7804 15.31914967 12 Launch on Sept. 22 : STARSHINE 3 1 90001U 01043D 01266.13079115 .00001694 00000-0 54654-4 0 12 2 90001 67.0499 86.6090 0005594 254.2442 326.7804 15.31914967 19 Launch on Sept. 23 : STARSHINE 3 1 90001U 01043D 01267.13079115 .00001694 00000-0 54654-4 0 13 2 90001 67.0499 87.5950 0005594 254.2442 326.7804 15.31914967 14 From my place, I have no visible passes before Sept. 26 given a launch on the 21st. :-( Links to SAPPHIRE and PCSat : http://ssdl.stanford.edu/squirt1/front_page.html http://web.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/pcsat.html Cheers, Dan -- Daniel Deak representant, projet spatial Starshine Drummondville, Quebec COSPAR site 1746 : 45.8537°N, 72.4857°W, 90 m., UTC-4:00 Site en francais sur les satellites: French-language satellite web site : http://www.obsat.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 21 2001 - 01:11:25 EDT
