swarm satellite passes
mar14
22mar14:
swarm B satellite overflight
26mar14: swarm A satellite overflight
The 430 carriage house transmitter was used on
two dates to measure the temperatures while the swarm a,b
satellite flew through the beam:
- tle computation used:
- aoLat: 18.34
- aoLong: -66.75
- aoHght: .5 km
- The
the telescope position was compute using:
- 15mar14 tle file
- 2014.03.22 20:21:50 (utc)
- wgs x,y,z 2667.289,-5975.017, 2165.614 km
- g_lat,g_long: 18.419, -65.944 deg , 516.381 km
- az,el,range: 83.999, el=79.813,(za=10.187) , range:
523.515 km
- it was recomputed using 24mar14 tle file for 20:21:50
- 24mar14: recomputed position for 22mar14,20:21:50
- lat: 19.18 (.761 deg higher)
- long:-65.97 ( .025 deg farther east)
- range=516.1 km
datataking:
- ch pointing at: at 83.999 az , za=10.187 .. pointing model was
added to these values.
- mracf 2 usec sampling 300 usec pulse, 2048 heights covering
150 to 764 km
- ipp - 10 milliseconds
processing:
- read 20 seconds of data around the expected overpass
- compute power for each height sample
dynamic spectra of overpass (.gif)
- horizontal direction : range (km) 300 meters resolution
- vertical scale (time hours utc) 1 second resolution (i
averaged 100 ipps together after computing power)
- the dotted vertical line is the expected overpass time:
20:21:50
- You can see the weak stripe a little after this time starting
at 523km
- The width is from the 300 usec transmitter pulse
- the stripe at 420 km may be another satellite?
average power over the transmitter pulse
for height=523 km (.ps) (.pdf)
- average the 150*2usec samples starting at height 523.5 km
(this averages over the rf pulse length) for each ipp in the20
seconds around the overpass.
- Normalize to the rms value using ipps prior to the overpass
- Top: range 523 km power vs time
- The satellite appeared near 20:22:00 (this is accurate to 1
second).l
- Bottom: blowup of the satellite overpass
- The horizontal scale is now seconds from measured
overpass.
- The time resolution is 10 milliseconds.
processing: x101/140322/430sat.pro
26mar14: swarm A pass
The pass was computed using the same 15mar14
tle file
The values computed to point the telescope were:
- date/time (utc):2014.03.26 8:05:20
- g_lat,g_long:(deg): 18.429 ,-66.832
- range: 471.416 km
- source az:-41.270
- el: 88.291 (za=1.709 deg)
- range: 471.114 km
I looked at file t2797_20140326.003 which started at 7:42 and
ended at 8:12 (utc).
The processing was:
- ipp=10 millisecs,gw=2 usecs, 2048 heights starting at 1000
usecs (150 to 760 km)
- for each ipp compute the power for each range sample
- average 100 ipps to give 1 sec resolution
- make an image of total power range vs time
- There are two echoes in the 30 minute image.. the are pretty
far from the expected time..
The image shows the power plotted
as range vs time (.gif)
- the horizontal axis is range in km
- the vertical scale is utc Hours
- the horizontal, vertical line show where we expected to find
the satellite
Computing swarmA ao pass using predict and a tle file from
28mar14
I grabbed a tle file for swarm a,b,c dated
28mar14
I used the predict program (and some idl software) to plot the
satellite pass around 8:00 utc on 26mar14
The plots show the
az, source za, and range computed using this setup (.ps) (.pdf):
- I told predict to compute at 1 second intervals.
- The * are the computed points
- the red dashed lines show the time for the 15mar14 tle
computation
- the blue lines are the az,za we actually used for the
observation.
- the az is off by a lot, but the za=1.7deg decreases the error
by sin(za)
- the za is off by about 13 degrees.
I've used this code for gps satellites, but i've never used it for
leo's .. maybe the resolution is not good enough...
processing:x101/140326/430sat.pro,
cmpsatorb.pro
home_~phil