All the hype over the chicken little contest caused me to wonder how tracking programs will handle it.
I was looked into the Cal Poly CP6 and HAWKSAT1 satellites. The TLE data is published on both Amsat and Celestrack lists. SatPC32 shows neither of the satellites as moving. An error is generated when trying to select either of them. I thought that perhaps they had decayed but had not been removed from the TLE lists.
GPredict continues to track Az-El for CP6 in real time in the text display but shows the elevation and altitude as negative and the up/down direction as D (decayed) - it does not display CP6 on the map. I am assuming that CP6 has decayed. The elevation for CP6 goes up and down and the tracking value change over time. Since the elevation is always negative perhaps GPredict is tracking what would have happened if the earth was just a tiny point of mass and the satellite is able to continue its downward descent. HAWKSAT1 shows up as above ground and running in GPredict.
Since ARISSAT1 is probably going to decay fairly quickly I took a look at predicting ahead using the great Preview tracking in SatPC32 to see how decay is handled. After a couple of really bad years the coverage map for ARISSAT1 looks better than ever starting just two years from now in 2014. Unfortunately I could not figure out how to get GPredict to predict more than 14 days in the future and did not want to fool around changing the system clock.
I have wondered what the NORAD routines would do after decay and how tracking programs that use the NORAD model would deal with it. Does the NORAD model continue to track as if the earth was just a very small very heavy point in space. A transparent 3D earth display would be very interesting to use to view the post chicken little results - someone must have one. Anyone know for sure ? HAWKSAT1 is still a bit of a mystery.
73 W9KE tom ...