Hi!
According to the morning numbers from Space Track, ARISSat-1 is down to 191 km, and losing about 1.5 km per orbit, or about 1 km per hour. The drag effects are increasing rapidly, so TODAY would be an excellent time to make any last minute QSOs through the transponder. Thanks to those who are keeping live telemetry flowing.
I wanted to see what passes I might have for ARISSat-1, and used the pass prediction utility on the AMSAT web site. I'm at the office, and don't have my personal laptops with their tracking programs handy. It is now showing only 3 more passes, two tonight and one at 1555-1600 UTC tomorrow. Even if I chose to see the next 50 passes, I only get data for these 3 passes.
Space-Track.org has a "TIP message" from a few hours ago predicting a decay time of 0534 UTC tomorrow +/- 11 hours. I suppose that is consistent with what I saw from the pass prediction utility on the AMSAT web site. Time is running out.......
73!
Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/