One of the great things about AMSAT is the willingness of people like Alan and Paul to share information and answer questions. I followed Alan's chicken-little contest and recall someone had done some graphs related to the decay. I tried searching for the postings but could not find them or remember who posted them. These days remembering what I had for breakfast is an occasion worthy of celebration. If anyone is willing to share their chicken-little contest secrets I would be most interested and appreciative.
73 W9KE tom...
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 7:41 AM, Alan P. Biddle [email protected] wrote:
Tom,
As usual, Paul has covered the important points. I would suggest, if you are really interested, getting an account on Space Track and looking at the archived values for TLE of decayed satellites. Looking at the decay rate will clearly give you an indication to within a day or so. Normally it is a value of something like .00000X, but in the final days that number increases rapidly. Empirically, when it gets close .01 the end is near, and the last data always shows something like the .15 Paul mentioned. Alternatively, if you are willing to look at two Keps, you can calculate the actual descent rate. I recall ARISSat-1 was descending at something like 20km/orbit at the end. I expect that if you pick 5-10 satellites and study the results, more detailed criteria will suggest themselves. There is no doubt a good AMSAT Journal article here.
From the ARISSat-1 Chicken Little contest, I learned that there are already many predictive models, but it should be relatively easy to decide from current Keps when the satellite is down. For my own use, I usually know from reports the status of any satellites which interest me. If a tracking program throws an exception, I check Space Track for recently decayed satellites, and here to see if there was a glitch in the Keps.
73s and have fun,
Alan WA4SCA
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Williamson Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2012 3:17 AM To: Thomas Doyle Cc: [email protected] Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: TACSAT 3 Question
On May 11, 2012, at 12:59 PM, Thomas Doyle wrote:
There must be a better way to detect re-entry than simply than throwing
an
unhandled exception.
You guys seem to be the experts - any suggestions on how to do it ? It seems to be related to the BSTAR drag value. Some say when the BSTAR drag value gets "too high" the sat has re-entered or is about to
re-enter.
I don't have access to SatPC32 internals, but most amateur tracking programs ignore BSTAR completely. BSTAR doesn't even appear in the so-called AMSAT format element sets. It might not be the element you're looking for.
Mean motion, the number of revolutions the satellite makes per day, is a nice simple value to look at to detect re-entry, but you can't just look at the mean motion in the element set. That value, like all the other values in the element set, is a snapshot as of the epoch time. Mean motion is actually changing all the time, and we model that change rather simplistically as linear. The value called "Decay rate" in the AMSAT format is basically the rate of change of the mean motion, revolutions per day per day. To compute the value of mean motion at the present (or target) time, you have to multiply the decay rate by the time (in days) elapsed since the epoch time of the element set, and add that to the mean motion from the element set.
The threshold to compare against would be the mean motion (number of revolutions per day) of a satellite in circular orbit on the threshold of re-entry. This would be somewhere between 16 revs/day (the familiar 90-minute orbit approximation) and about 17 revs/day (the mean motion a satellite would have if orbiting at sea level).
For TACSAT-3 as shown in the current Keplerian elements bulletin, today (day 133 of 2012):
16.45 + (133-121.7) * 0.152 = 18.17
a clearly subterranean mean motion. If you compare TACSAT-3's values to those of other satellites in the bulletin, you'll see that both mean motion (16.45) and decay rate (0.15) are outliers, much higher than any of the others.
It might or might not make sense to add a filter like that to a program like NASAWASH. The element set is not invalid in itself. It's just invalid if propagated to the present time.
I know I've glossed over a few details in the above analysis. I'm sure one of the experts who actually understands orbital mechanics will correct me if I've fouled it up entirely.
73 -Paul [email protected]
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