Tim,
Getting an image is clearly possible, but only if you can get a certain agency known by its initials to do it. Recall that Skylab, circa 1973, took some damage on launch. Some amazing pictures were provided by said agency, among others, to assess what was needed for repair. Now imagine 35 years later. However, that is not going to happen, and in any case, there is little to be gained, though of course we are all curious.
Alan WA4SCA
-----Original Message----- From: amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org [mailto:amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org] On Behalf Of Tim - N3TL Sent: 15 October, 2009 07:58 To: k6hx@arrl.net; amsat-bb@amsat.org Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: On the possibility of imaging AO-40 with earth boundtelescopes...
Please see Page 19 of the May-June 2008 issue of The AMSAT Journal.
Patrick Seitzer, WA4DSR, provided a photo of AO-40 taken by the University of Michigan's Curtis-Schmidt Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Following is information from a University of Michigan Web page about the telescope:
"The Curtis-Schmidt telescope is a 0.61 meter aperture f/3.5 Schmidt telescope located at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, about 500 km north of Santiago, Chile. This telescope was originally installed at the University of Michigan's Portage Lake Observatory in 1950, and moved to the much clearer skies of north central Chile in 1966. It is named for Heber D. Curtis, Director of the University of Michigan Observatories from 1930 until 1942. The telescope is dedicated to optical studies of artificial space debris for NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center. Projects include optical surveys for debris and follow-up observations to determine orbits and photometric properties of recently discovered debris." If you find the Journal photo, you'll see a field with dozens of blurred stars and one sharp litttle white dot, which is AO-40. I believe it's safe to say that obtaining an image with the detail necessary to try assess damage is impossible. 73 to all,
Tim - N3TL
________________________________ From: Mark VandeWettering kf6kyi@gmail.com To: amsat-bb@amsat.org Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 2:57:40 AM Subject: [amsat-bb] On the possibility of imaging AO-40 with earth bound telescopes...
Has there been any serious attempt to take a photograph of the damaged bird using ground based optical telescopes while it is in sunlight ?
It's not going to work. AO-40 just isn't big enough. For fun, let's worth through some of the details.
With modern telescopes such as
http://www.refractortelescopes.co.uk/reviews/orion/orion-shorttube-80-a-refr actor-telescope/
or similiar and a modern digital camera and a known RA/DEC co-ordinate of the satellite at any point in its orbit, it should be possible get a fairly decent picture of what is still up there...
Note RA / DEC are astronomy co-ordinates which should be able to be calculated from AZ/EL or TLE, but I may not be able to do it myself.
We don't need to track it, but just to image it in several consecutive frames. From:
http://www.emergentspace.com/pubs/AIAA_GNC_2002_AMSAT_A040.pdf
Table 1. Nominal Orbit Parameters for AO-40 Orbit Parameter Value Semimajor Axis (km) 36,245 Perigee Height (km) 1,042 Apogee Height (km) 58,691 Eccentricity 0.797 Inclination (deg) 6.04 Period (hours) 19.1
Let's look at a couple of potential telescopes. The short tube refractor that you linked to has an 80 mm (roughly 3 inch) aperature. According to the Rayleigh criterion, that scope should be able to resolve angles as small as about 1.5 arc seconds. At perigee, the resolving power is 1042000 * tan(1.5 arc seconds), or about 7.5 meters (or 25 feet). To increase the resolution by a factor of 2, you need to to double the aperature. To get resolutions down to 1/2 a foot, you need an aperature 50x larger, or 150 inches.
This doesn't take into account any effects of atmosphere either. it's actually fairly rare to get sub arcsecond resolution from any earthbound telescope without using adaptive optics.. This limits the practicality of high resolution imaging.
Impressive photos of the space shuttle, ISS and HST have been taken using amateur equipment, but these objects are both closer and an order of magnitude larger than AO-40. While we might be able to measure spin rate and the like by measuring the brightness curve, actual imaging of the satellite isn't likely.
73 Mark K6HX _______________________________________________ Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb _______________________________________________ Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb