It seems to me that everyone in LEO is getting warnings now. Unfortunately that crash caused a lot of debris. Delfi-C3 made it through ok, as well as the other cubes on our launch. so good luck to AO-51!
Wouter Weggelaar PA3WEG Delfi-C3 mission ops team
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 5:45 AM, Tom Clark, K3IO K3IO@verizon.net wrote:
The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg AFB has reported that AO-51 will have a ~200 meter (i.e. 2 football fields) approach to object #34890 at 08:51Z on April 13th.
Object #34890 (see http://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=34890 and http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/iridium-33-debris.txt) is one piece of the more than 500 pieces of debris left over after the Iridium-33 -- Kosmos-2251 collision on Feb. 10,2009 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision). The total mass of the two spacecraft was about 1600 kg (well over one ton).
You can get an HD movie animation of the Iridium/Kosmos collision here (warning -- 50 MB ZIP file).
73, Tom
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