Echostar 18 Launch Approx 4:15 EDT June 18 2016
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Speaking of "wild a**", check out the Ariane Flight VA230 replay video over on the ArianeSpace site, and make sure you turn the CC on...
http://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-va230/ (the last ten seconds of the countdown are amusing, to say the least)
We expect computers to drive our cars, and they can't even understand the difference between French and English...
There seemed to be a mad scramble to Adriane after the Russians had multiple failures a couple years ago.
The old rocket engineers died off or retired. They got that great American idea about consolidating to cut costs and employees and are paying the price.
When E18 expected to be in its orbital location and begin testing?
Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys mobile app
Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys mobile app
My bad, I apologize, I was obviously well mis-informed.
I totally forgot all about E15.
I even remember the launch.
Samsung Galaxy S6 Active
Nelson, is this site any good to track with? It's acting like a jumping bean lol
http://www.n2yo.com/?s=41592
http://www.n2yo.com/?s=41592
n2yo is a good site.
The initial launch puts it into an elliptical orbit with the perigee around 250 km from the earth and the apogee at 35000+ (close to the geostationary elevation). The last published epoch (location snapshot) was Tuesday morning. At that time it appears that they have had one or more burns that raised the perigee from about 250 km to about 7400 km. The apogee is 35000+ or near the geostationary orbit.
The rocket guys do their burns so the perigee is increased in increments until it is at the geo altitude.
At the same time, they will be making inclination adjustments to bring the satellite inclination into the 0 degree latitude orbit.
The burns will be planned to move the satellite into it's final longitudinal position with minimal fuel consumption.
So you will see the ellipse slowly disappear, and the large changes decrease each time they make a burn.
The government publishes snapshots of the satellite locations at varying times. Sometimes several in a day, other times, days between observations.
Those observations have an "epoch" timestamp when the observation was made. The data can be copied and pasted into a variety of programs that convert it into readable data.
Any location or movement you see on the sites is a time projection based on the last epoch
You can register at space-track.org to extract all the epochs for any satellite.
Celestrak.com is an excellent site that republishes the space-track data.
If you want to see all the technical data, or see graphical representations of the satellite movement (a figure 8 spiral) I would suggest
satellite-calculations.com
It has many different types of analysis and graphical representation .
Copy the current E18 epoch data from Celestrak and paste it into the two line tracker and you will get the extended data analysis. Be sure to include the EchoStar 18 header line.
The initial launch puts it into an elliptical orbit with the perigee around 250 km from the earth and the apogee at 35000+ (close to the geostationary elevation). The last published epoch (location snapshot) was Tuesday morning. At that time it appears that they have had one or more burns that raised the perigee from about 250 km to about 7400 km. The apogee is 35000+ or near the geostationary orbit.
The rocket guys do their burns so the perigee is increased in increments until it is at the geo altitude.
At the same time, they will be making inclination adjustments to bring the satellite inclination into the 0 degree latitude orbit.
The burns will be planned to move the satellite into it's final longitudinal position with minimal fuel consumption.
So you will see the ellipse slowly disappear, and the large changes decrease each time they make a burn.
The government publishes snapshots of the satellite locations at varying times. Sometimes several in a day, other times, days between observations.
Those observations have an "epoch" timestamp when the observation was made. The data can be copied and pasted into a variety of programs that convert it into readable data.
Any location or movement you see on the sites is a time projection based on the last epoch
You can register at space-track.org to extract all the epochs for any satellite.
Celestrak.com is an excellent site that republishes the space-track data.
If you want to see all the technical data, or see graphical representations of the satellite movement (a figure 8 spiral) I would suggest
satellite-calculations.com
It has many different types of analysis and graphical representation .
Copy the current E18 epoch data from Celestrak and paste it into the two line tracker and you will get the extended data analysis. Be sure to include the EchoStar 18 header line.
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You know, after watching the NASA show about space junk, I'm wondering do the launch companies have a program to deorbit the upper stages so they aren't cluttering the NEO environment? Obviously, the Ariane 5's transfer stage was gaining altitude when it released the two satellites destined for Geostationary Orbits, but is there enough propellant left to give it a deltaV that puts it into a reentry path targeting an unoccupied ocean expanse?
Not speaking to NEO and stages of rockets, but there is already a requirement that mandates sats must be put at a far greater distance from the earth for its graveyard orbit due to the concern of increasing space junk. This requires more fuel to achieve. When the requirement was implemented some years ago, some sat operators, including Echostar, were a bit miffed because they had never the opportunity to plan for the distant graveyard orbit either before launch or even in its life of many movements from slot to slot. Some sats operators weren't sure some of their sats could even achieve it. However, all the sat operators have had the last few years to plan for this, and so, movements are done in the most efficient manner and not done without careful consideration for achieving the new proper graveyard orbit. Yeah, space junk is a REAL problem.
Ok, possibly stupid question here, but rather than put dead sats into a higher graveyard orbit, why not just de-orbit them in such a way that burn up harmlessly over a major ocean (Atlantic or Pacific)?
Because you can't guarantee that they will burn up harmlessly over an ocean. It's like you can steer them once they re-enter...
Granted, you can't steer them once they hit atmosphere, but they should be able to target a re-entry area and angle such that if anything survives re-entry, it'll just hit water. Just seems to me that cluttering up NEO with dead sats is just not the best overall solution...
I believe the old communications sats are sent into a higher orbit outside of geostationary. Nothing valuable out there.
Can't we just put a giant magnet in orbit and collect all the space junk into one big giant mass that could be easily avoided? 
