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Jonathan McDowell Profile picture
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9 May, 5 tweets, 1 min read
CZ-5B-Y2 rocket now orbiting northeast over the central Atlantic Ocean, heading for a pass over Portugal
The rocket stage will pass over Lisbon in a few minutes: 0030 UTC / 0230 CEST
It'll also pass right over Madrid a minute later, 0231 CEST
And then southeast of Barcelona. and on to Porto-Vecchio, Corsica and just south of Rome at 0234 CEST
In the next few minutes it will pass over Tirana (Albania) and then Macedonia, and to the south of Istanbul and just south of Ankara

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Jonathan McDowell Profile picture
9 May
OK back to new space news. At 0642 UTC May 9, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The first stage (S/N B1051 on its 10th flight) landed on the droneship Just Read The Instructions in the Atlantic as the second stage went to orbit.
The second stage reached a parking orbit at 0650 UTC and then raised perigee at about 0725 UTC, successfully releasing a stack of 60 more Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit at 0746 UTC.
After this, the second stage is expected to have made a "deorbit burn", firing its engine to slam down into the atmosphere over the ocean southwest of Australia, safely disposing of the stage.
Read 4 tweets
Jonathan McDowell Profile picture
9 May
Good morning (or timezone-appropriate greeting) everyone. I got some sleep and am now back in action.
A few followp comments on yesterday's Chinese rocket extravaganza:
1) I want to clarify that the disrepancy in the Space-Track coordinates (in Saudi Arabia)
and time/location (Maldives) was a documentation/ communication issue, not an analysis error - they referred to two different things.
2) My maps used a Google Earth basemap, as I assume was obvious.
I apologize for not having included the relevant attributions.
Read 9 tweets
Jonathan McDowell Profile picture
9 May
If the rocket's still up, it's passing over Aeropoli and Kythira in Greece
... Sitia in Crete
Now passing over Gaza, if it's still up.
Read 5 tweets
Jonathan McDowell Profile picture
8 May
The EU SST prediction is narrow enough that we can start to talk about location now!
In particular, none of the orbits within the predicted window cross the northwestern US or the mid Atlantic seaboard.
Southern Africa is also out of the target crosshairs
In India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are clear, as are most the northern stages like Uttar Pradesh and Odisha
Read 5 tweets
Jonathan McDowell Profile picture
7 May
This one is for the deep nerds, you know who you are. Objects 44983 and 45039 were SOZ debris objects in elliptical 400 x 19000 km orbits until Dec 2020 when the 18SPCS catalog numbers were suddenly reassigned [1/n]
Since Dec 2020 those numbers have referred to two totally different objects, debris objects from the Iridium-Cosmos collision in 700-km-ish circular orbits. So historical TLE analysts should be careful: the 2020 TLEs for those cat numbers should not be mixed with the 2021 TLEs
What happened to those SOZ objects described by those 2020 TLEs? Did they never exist? Were they accidental duplicates of other objects? Did they suddenly evaporate? Who knows... these catalog changes happen without explanation.
Read 5 tweets
Jonathan McDowell Profile picture
5 May
Chinese media via Reuters: reuters.com/article/space-…

I have some comments:
"likely to fall in international waters" - correct, but you don't know that for sure.
"not worth panicking about" - I completely agree, no reason for panic. BUT
"... could cause damage [is] Western hype" No, I disagree. The last one caused damage!
"China's .. space monitoring network will keep a close watch ... and take measures to avoid damage to passing ships" Eh? What measures? There is absolutely nothing they can do. This is what is known in the trade as a "lie".
Read 5 tweets

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