Launch is set for Monday -- take a look at
the unusual ascent trajectory, and follow the
plot out a few more thousand miles....



April 7, 2006

MetOp to be shipped to Baikonour 17 April
http://www.eumetsat.int/idcplg?IdcSe...rgetNodeId=114

Following yesterday's decision by EUMETSAT, the first operational
meteorological satellite of the EPS mission, MetOp, has been declared ready
for shipment to the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.


The 4.2 tonne satellite will leave Toulouse airport on 17 April 2006
on-board an Antonov 124 transport plane. This will be the second of a total
of three Antonov 124 flights, foreseen to transport the separate parts of
the satellite - the Service Module, the Payload Module and the Solar Array -
including the electrical and mechanical ground support equipment required
for the launch campaign.

MetOp will be launched by Starsem on 17 July at 22:28 Baikonour time (18:28
CEST) with the latest Soyuz ST/Fregat version. This version will incorporate
new digital avionics and a new, larger fairing of diameter 4.11 m, which
will be flown for the first time with MetOp. The launcher trajectory will be
north-west - heading towards Svalbard and north Greenland.

MetOp flies at an altitude of about 837 km (i.e. approximately 43 times
closer to Earth than a geostationary satellite), observing smaller areas in
considerably finer detail. The Metop series consists of a total of three
satellites, which are designed to provide Meteorological operational data
from polar orbit until 2020. The MetOp satellite will provide global data
that significantly improves forecasts of severe weather and disaster
mitigation and will also contribute to the monitoring of the climate and the
environment.

All MetOp satellites have been developed by a joint EUMETSAT and European
Space Agency (ESA) team, with EADS Astrium as the prime contractor. A total
of 11 instruments are aboard the Metop satellites, which are provided by
EUMETSAT, ESA, the French Space Agency (CNES), and the US National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

==========

Wrong Metop Data with H.A.
From: Gerhard HOLTKAMP )
Date: Fri Jul 14 2006 - 15:48:49 EDT


Heavens-Above allows you already to select Metop (MetOp-A) but be advised
that
you should not yet generate any predictions for it with H.A. as their orbit
elements are about half a revolution out of step with the actually planned
ones (at least at the moment of this posting - 19 UTC, 14-JUL-06). Maybe
they
fix it before Monday's launch; otherwise as soon as Spacetrack posts Metop
elements after the launch the situation will probably remedy itself. (So a
day after launch you should be safe.)

The following is the planned insertion state vector for Metop (which I got
from Metop flight dynamics):

Elements in J2000.
EPOCH: 2006/07/17-17:36:53.560 UTC
X 522.81136
Y -2427.98222
Z -6764.74918
Vx -1.8691329
Vy -6.8111776
Vz 2.30034444

From this I get the following TLEs (which I already posted earlier):

Metop Sep
1 99999U 06099A 06198.73395324 .00000028 00000-0 26562-4 0 1
2 99999 98.7337 257.5914 0024535 156.6977 131.5842 14.21428546 1

I should add that these TLEs are not as perfect as I would like them. They
show deviations up to 30 km from the numeric propagation of the state vector
(Usually when generating TLEs out of state vectors my deviations are only
about 2 or 3 km - I don't know why I got this fairly large deviation here.)
Still this would mean an error of only 4 seconds or so and the above TLEs
should be more than adequate to locate Metop in the hours after launch. (And
keep in mind that the insertion might not be perfect! I think 2 or 3 seconds
either way might not be uncommon.)

Gerhard HOLTKAMP
Darmstadt, Germany