Peter Birtwhistle

Forum Replies Created

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • in reply to: Identification of artificial satellites / junk? #581219
    Peter Birtwhistle
    Participant

    Hi Tim,

    If you can get two or more positions for a suspected artsat you can use the online SatID page to try and make an identification:

    https://www.projectpluto.com/sat_id2.htm

    More than one position is required to get a rate and direction of of motion for matching to known objects. SatID requires positions in MPC format which isn’t too difficult to manually format. Your time/RA/Dec translates to this (using my observatory code J95 which is close enough to your site):

         ARTSAT   C2019 07 26.00547519 44 27.00 -06 53 54.0                      J95

    Try as a test these two observations from ATLAS which should identify as art sat 1999-040D:

         A10f7FB* C2019 07 27.39210618 38 00.78 -19 14 18.6          14.59oVNEOCPT08

         A10f7FB  C2019 07 27.39767518 38 37.34 -19 25 31.0          15.25oVNEOCPT08

    The output from SatID was:

    2 observations found 2 observations left after dropping extras A10f7FB* C2019 07 27.39210618 38 00.78 -19 14 18.6 14.59oVNEOCPT08 25869U = 1999-040D e=0.82; P=1481.0 min; i=36.3: IUS R/B(2) motion 1.76″/sec at PA 142.3; dist= 73013.8 km; offset= 0.00 deg 0.1 seconds elapsed

    (Just in case the formatting of the MPC lines gets messed up, I’ve attached those examples in a word doc)

    Peter

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)