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Cosmos 1 status
It's just been announced in the past hour or so that the Cosmos 1 team thinks it has received a signal from the solar sail spacecraft, after silence for most of the day since launch. Heavens-Above is posting pass information, but I assume that it's based on pre-launch nominal orbit information, because the Planetary Society's website says that they aren't sure yet what orbit the thing is in. Also, until the sails are unfurled in a few days (cross fingers), the thing is pretty dim. E.g. there's a pass coming up here in a few minutes that's at mag. 8.5. The brightest I see is 6.4. It's nice to see that on their page about watching for the satellite, they suggest that beginners look for Iridium flashes or the ISS. So that's some nice PR for flash junkies. :-) Project home page he http://www.planetary.org/solarsail How-to-watch page he http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/watch/index.html Patty |
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Patty Winter wrote:
It's just been announced in the past hour or so that the Cosmos 1 team thinks it has received a signal from the solar sail spacecraft, after silence for most of the day since launch. Heavens-Above is posting pass information, but I assume that it's based on pre-launch nominal orbit information, because the Planetary Society's website says that they aren't sure yet what orbit the thing is in. Also, until the sails are unfurled in a few days (cross fingers), the thing is pretty dim. E.g. there's a pass coming up here in a few minutes that's at mag. 8.5. The brightest I see is 6.4. It's nice to see that on their page about watching for the satellite, they suggest that beginners look for Iridium flashes or the ISS. So that's some nice PR for flash junkies. :-) Project home page he http://www.planetary.org/solarsail How-to-watch page he http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/watch/index.html That would explain why nothing showed up in binoculars when our location had a near-zenith pass (predicted from Heavens-Above) at about 0220 UT... Here's hoping it's still in some sort of eventually useful orbit. Bill Keel |
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