Ciel 2 Tracking

Jens Satre sent me a note that he put in a patch in that corrected the date error for 2009 TLE's (still some problems with Epochs from 2008 that he has yet to fix). It works fine on Ciel with all the drift rates, locations, oscillations, etc reporting correctly.

satellite-calculations.com

Still not working for me (showing Long = 99.something).

Brad
 
E5 seems to have made space. It's now at 128.8.

Time to start monitoring TPs 20, 24, 25, 26, and 29 (the inop/off TPs of E5) for activity. If you see signal here, you know it's from Ciel-2.
 
Is there some information about which transponders they will use for CONUS beam, and if those are going to be in HD or SD?
 
TPs 1-17 spot, 17-32 CONUS. (17 is switchable)

Transponder doesn't care if it is broadcasting HD or SD, but we'll see mostly HD on Ciel-2, perhaps with the exception of some SD locals.
 
The last epoch was at around 11 PM MST on Jan 26. The drift rate is still at around 2 degrees per day. I am thinking the next reading will show this guy slowing down ...
 
Why would they slow it down at all? If a 5 minute burn (just for the sake of discussion) took it from 0 deg per day to 2 deg per day, then wouldn't they just do another 5 minute burn the opposite way when they were 5 minutes away from 129?

Point being, why do 5, 1 minute burns and slow it down over hours instead of a single burn at the right time?

Replace 5 minutes with 30 seconds or 2 hours or whatever it really is.
 
It's the same as slowing down gradually to a stop light vs. locking up the brakes at the last possible moment. You'll hit the same mark, but the first one gives a lot more room to correct for error.
 
I didn't think it was the same. I thought that since the amount of thrust could be measured so exactly there really would be no error.

Part of the reason I slow down at a stop light is because I'm burning fuel the whole time I rush up to it. Slamming on the breaks is wasting gas. Even if I didn't care about that, I really can't be 100% sure how much pressure I'm giving to the breaks, how well the tires and road will grip, etc.. I don't know much pressure will be needed to stop the motion.

In space, all of that is removed. 200 lbs of thrust to the east should be exactly canceled by 200 lbs of thrust to the west, right? Just trying to understand better.