On Tuesday at 2pm I'll be in room 205 for the "Space as an Environment" splinter session which will include an update on the issue of satellite constellations affecting ground based astronomy
That topic will be continued on Wed at 10am, room 201/202, for the "Space as an Environment" open house, where I'll be tabling and available for informal discussion about the satcon and other space env issues #AAS241
On Wed at 12.45 at the AAS reg desk I invite alumni of the SAO Astronomy Summer REU to join me for our traditional networking lunch expedition, actual eating venue still TBD #AAS241
And if you don't see me at any of those, I'll probably run into you as I wander around the exhibit hall most days! Enjoy the meeting #AAS241
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The Japanese space agency JAXA is preparing to deploy 3 cubesats from the ISS.
The cubesats are stored in the J-SSOD #24 deployer, which was brought to ISS on Dragon CRS-26 and transferred internally to the Kibo module.
The Japanese JRMS robot arm has extracted J-SSOD #24 from the Kibo airlock and is now holding the deployer out against the direction of ISS motion so that the ejected sats will not recontact ISS.
The first sat to be ejected will be the 1U test satellite SS-1 (SuryaSat) from Surya University in Jakarta.
OK, it's Sunday night and I'm going to get technical on you.
You may be familiar with the Lagrange Points - specifically Sun-Earth L1 and L2 (SEL1 and SEL2), which are 1.5 million km towards noon and towards midnight respectively.
As the Earth goes round the Sun, L1 and L2 travel with it. So if you define a coordinate system which rotates around the Sun with the Earth, the L1 and L2 points are fixed in that system. One such system is GSE: Geocentric Solar Ecliptic.
LAUNCH of Falcon 9 at 2248 UTC Dec 16 from Cape Canaveral LC40 with two O3b-mPOWER communications satellites
20 first-gen O3b satellites were launched to 8000 km equatorial orbits in 2013 to 2019. They had a mass of 700 kg.
The new O3b mPOWER sats are Boeing 702X satellites with a . mass of 1700 kg each. I believe their size is around 1.5 x 3.0 x 3.0 m with about 27m solar panel span
Correction, O3b-mPOWER mass may be 2050 kg each, based on info in @SpaceflightNow 's coverage
@AbainzaRalph@AerospaceCorp@NASA Very interesting. This is actually NOT the CZ-5B core stage which reentered on Jul 30. It's a piece of the nose fairing that was jettisoned during launch on Jul 24.
@AbainzaRalph@AerospaceCorp@NASA Amazingly, the Mindoro Strait lies on BOTH the Jul 24 initial rocket launch path (red line east from Hainan) AND the Jul 30 core stage reentry path (purple line going NE from Sumatra to the Phillipines)
OK, we now have reports - some convincing - of CZ-5B debris found on the island of Borneo, on both the Indonesian and Malaysian sides of the border.
A report from Batu Niah
shows this object - I can't tell if this is space debris or not. There are other reports of debris in locations close to Batu Niah
But the same news report gives a shot of something that is CLEARLY a large part of the reentered stage, in Balaikarangan in W Kalimantan