sohail@terak.UUCP (08/10/84)
According to Desmond King-Hele's book "Observing Earth Satellites", there are roughly 5000 (five thousand) significant man-made objects in earth orbit. Watching these objects cross the sky every moonless night an hour after sunset is one of my favorite pastimes. The Ruskies were kind enough to send up a booster 6-8 meters in length , with every 'Cosmos' satellite. These boosters, painted white, usually go into orbit with the payload for 2 weeks to 20 years. In contrast, most of the United States launches were very tidy about putting thier booster trash in ballistic arcs or very shortlived orbits. (Maybe someone from NASA could enlighten us on the validity of my last sentence) The pretty white, tumbling, spent boosters make much better backyard targets then the small black silicon covered functional devices that are gyro-stabilized. I remain Cliff Cordes ...hao!noao!terak!cliff
martin@ism780.UUCP (08/17/84)
#R:terak:-13400:ism780:13100003:000:661 ism780!martin Aug 16 13:08:00 1984 I believe you can get the current number of orbiting payloads and/or junk by calling the Space Defense Center in Cheyene Mountain. I don't think the number of payloads is classified. When I was a programmer in the USAF working at the SDC, a friend and I once put the coordinates of his garage roof into the Look Angle computation program. Out came look angles for all the satellites (the unclassified ones, of course) oriented to his garage. That night we set up a small telescope up there and were able to find most of the ones we had listed quite easily. You might be able to get similar information for your garage. martin smith, INTERACTIVE Systems